Category: History
Hobbes: “A new decade is coming up.” Calvin: “Yeah, big deal! Hmph. Where are the flying cars? Where are the moon colonies? Where are the personal robots and the …
“Our advice: Beware of geeks bearing formulas.” — Warren Buffett, Letter to Shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, Reporting Huge Losses In the classic 1961 Disney science fiction comedy movie The …
The word “mathematics” comes from the Greek μάθημα (máthema) meaning lesson and the verb μαθαίνω (mathéno) meaning “to learn”. It could be argued that math anxiety is anxiety about …
During the seventeenth century, the physicist Isaac Newton conducted a series of experiments studying the properties of light. Newton encountered a puzzling enigma. He found that light behaved both …
“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The …
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. — …
This year (2009) is the 400th anniversary of the publication of Johannes Kepler’s book New Astronomy (Astronomia Nova) announcing the discovery of the elliptical orbit of Mars to the …
In my last blog entry, I mentioned several math books I’ve been reading lately. Over the weekend I wrapped up reading Mathematicians: An Outer View of the Inner World, …
Two beautiful mathematical documentaries are “Fermat’s Last Theorem” and “Dangerous Knowledge”. Both take a popular science style approach to describing compelling and emotional stories about great mathematicians. The first …
This article was written by Gregory Thole, a graduate student in mathematics at Boston College. If you’d like to write for Math-Blog.com as well, please email us at submissions@math-blog.com. …