Welcome to Day 1 of our tour of basic math. If your New Year’s Resolution is to brush up on your math skills. You’re in the right place. Winter is really the perfect time to talk about integers. But first,
Today, the Museum of Mathematics (MoMath) in New York City has its opening ceremony. But that’s not what makes this date really special. Organizers of this tribute to numeracy chose 12-12-12 very carefully. Want to guess why? Geeks and superstitious folks around the world love dates
The British were deep in the throes of the Battle of the Atlantic. In six short months of 1940, German U-boats had sunk three million tons of Allied shipping. The U.S. Navy joined the quickly growing British forces in the region
Ada Lovelace was probably bound for greatness. The product of the brief marriage between Lord Byron (yes, that Lord Byron) and Anne Isabella (“Annabella”) Milbanke, she was born in 1815. But in true Romantic tragedy, her parents separated soon after her birth ,
Before beginning this story, a little background. There are two really basic ways to think of calculus: 1. The study of the infinite (extremely large) and the infinitesimal (extremely small). Or 2. The study of limits. Imagine a gnat that is flying from
It seems to me that the Greek philosopher and scientist, Archimedes, was like the forgetful scientist. And a few tales of his life support this theory. Born in 287 B.C. on the island of Sicily, he had the good fortune
While the development of numbers continued for many, many centuries, even before the discovery or invention of zero, the Greeks were responsible for a long, long period filled with mathematical advances. By 600 B.C., a fellow named Thales of Miletus brought Babylonian
Things were moving right along in the invention and use of number systems. The Sumerians started things off sometime during the 3rd millenium, when their budding commerce system helped them invent the first set of written numbers. The Egyptians systematically engineered a formal base-ten
So the Sumerian system of numbers — as far as we know, the first in the world — came into being rather naturally and out of necessity. But the Egyptians took things one step further, and they did it very systematically. Priests and
When the world began 4.54 billion years ago, it didn’t come with numbers. They didn’t appear with the dinosaurs or first mammals or even the first homo sapiens. That’s because numbers were createdas a way to describe the world. And that
Was mathematics invented or discovered? (I’ll give you a second or two to really think about that.) Most non-mathematicians have never really given that question much thought. Math has just always been there. An isosceles triangle has always had two
Most of you are probably sick to death of Political campaign polls. But these numbers have become a mainstay of the American political process. In other words, we’re stuck with them, so you might as well get used to it —