A shot in the air

The philosopher Ortega y Gasset said in his work La idea de Principio en Leibniz (written in 1947, but published in 1958) “By 1860 the continuity of the seriously philosophical tradition had been lost, even […]

I said in my previous post Borges, Kafka and Munch (I), that both Borges and Kafka reflected infinity in some of their stories and novels, but while Kafka’s infinity would correspond to Aristotle’s infinite potential, […]

Jorge Luis Borges is, no doubt, one of the writers who has best succeeded in reflecting infinity in his literary work. In fact, he entitled one of his collections of short stories The Aleph; and […]

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was a promising scientist and mathematician, an outstanding precursor of infinitesimal calculus, projective geometry and probability, made contributions in hydrodynamics and was also a skilled experimenter, who built the first calculating machine […]

The intensity of Einstein’s marriage with the media was a singular sociological fact (see the posts Einstein superstar: the invention of the celebrity scientist, The exquisitely stupid questions of the reporters). Einstein’s dizzying rise to […]

There is something spooky in the simplicity of the Newton’s apple anecdote, and in how useful it has been throughout history in popularising the figure of Newton as a genius. Something similar had happened before […]

The Indian mathematician Ramanujan claimed that each integer was his personal friend. Which, in a way, implies personalising numbers, imagining that each one of them has special characteristics, whatever they may be, that make it […]

  I recently published a post on the beauty of mathematics, and the importance that aesthetic considerations have had in its development. It is perhaps surprising that in a science like physics, which is closer […]