Pacioli and Leonardo
This year celebrates the 500th anniversary of the death of Luca Pacioli. A mathematician as well as a friar –a Franciscan in this case– he was linked to two of the greatest artists of the […]
Month: March 2017
Wine and mice
The Workings: Today’s divertimento offers a curious and intoxicating Russian roulette for mice. It touches on a tricky subject: the use of animals for experiments. Curiously enough, the famous Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan found this practice […]
Solution: Wine and mice
We now publish the solution to the Wine and mice divertimento. Divertimento: We collected 1000 bottles of wine to celebrate a party. The day before the event, we receive a warning that one of the […]
Castrating culture (by. H.M. Enzensberger)
A year after publishing The Number Devil, the poet, essayist, novelist, editor and translator Hans Magnus Enzensberger presented a short essay at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin (1998) entitled Drawbridge Up: Mathematics – […]
Pi and the Nazis
(published in El Cultural, supplement of El Mundo on the occasion of Pi Day) In my first year as a mathematics student, one of the teachers defined the number \(\pi\) in a rather fanciful way. The […]
Stories from the Scottish Café: 4. The Scottish Café Awards
In the next post of Fun & Games we return to the book One hundred problems in elementary Mathematics, by the Polish mathematician Hugo Steinhaus (1887-1972). So today we will dedicate this entry to continue […]