Abel, Nobel, Fields
The recent award of the Abel prize to Yves Meyer, for his crucial role in the development of the mathematical theory of wavelets, brings back to the fore the periodic debate on the ‘mathematics Nobel […]
Month: May 2017
Sexual connotations of Eureka (by S. Hawking)
We already know how close, according to Saint Augustine, science is to sex (Science and sex). As we want to create controversy, today we bring a discordant opinion; in this case from a self-confessed atheist: […]
Pacioli, Dürer and the highly secret science of the human body
A few weeks ago I devoted a post (Pacioli and Leonardo) to the personality of Luca Pacioli, taking as an excuse the fifth centenary of his death. There I commented on his relationship with Leonardo […]
Einstein, Wigner and the mystery of Mathematics
In a previous post we commented on the Galilean idea that Mathematics is the language for describing the world around us. That the World (Nature, or the Universe) can be studied with our senses and […]
Cantor’s Paradise
God was with the righteous at his right hand and felt an emptiness at his left. It is not good for us to be bored. Let us make Cantor’s Paradise. And He looked to his […]
The Happy End Problem
Today we comment on the article On the Erdös-Szekeres convex polygon problem by Andrew Suk published online in the Journal of the American Mathematical Society. Before commenting on the content of the article, we will […]
Romance and algebra (by F. Bascombe)
Frank Bascombe is one of the most unforgettable fictional characters that literature has given us in the last three decades – a sort of Sancho Panza orphaned from Don Quixote. I am tempted to write […]
The rolled-up ribbon
The Workings: Today’s divertimento is once again devoted to the book One hundred problems in elementary Mathematics, by the Polish mathematician Hugo Steinhaus (1887-1972) (one of the most original books of elementary problems ever published, […]
Solution: The rolled-up ribbon
We now publish the solution to the divertimento The rolled-up ribbon. Divertimento: We wind a ribbon 25 m long and 0.1 mm thick around a cardboard cylinder, obtaining a cylindrical roll whose diameter is 1 […]
Stories of the Scottish Café: and 6. Feeding Lice
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 post to the […]