Basic wardrobe

Before answering the question, let us review the situation in Europe one hundred years ago. The major European powers had triggered a devastating war, which they had also exported to other parts of the world, […]

It is difficult to imagine in 18th century England how a lad working in the coal mines could become a member of the Royal Society and one of the most celebrated British mathematicians of his […]

The IMUS, with the participation of the Faculty of Mathematics, will hold a one-day event on Wednesday 19 February to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the passing of the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. In the […]

In mid-January 1922, Hermann Weyl arrived in Malaga for a long stay in our country. The initiative had come from Esteban Terradas, an active Catalan scientist-engineer, who invited him to give a course of eight […]

Niels Abel (1802-1829) was one of the most precocious and brilliant mathematicians in history, yet he had serious difficulties in getting recognition for the enormous quality of his work. Particularly dramatic was the episode that […]

The Bernoullis are undoubtedly the most famous family saga in the history of mathematics, some of its members being among the great mathematicians of the last third of the 17th century and the whole of […]

This year 2019 marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of Mirifici logarithmorum canonis constructio (Construction of a marvellous table of logarithms) by John Napier, the creator of Napierian logarithms. John Napier, VIII Baron Merchiston, […]

In the summer of 1833, the great French mathematician Augustin Cauchy was in his third year of exile. Cauchy, convinced of the divine right that bound the French Bourbons to the throne, had left France […]

Sofia Kovalevskaya (whose name is sometimes written as Sonia Kovalevsky, due to the vagaries of transcription) said that “it is impossible to be a mathematician without also having the soul of a poet”. A very […]

I said in my previous entry in the Basic Wardrobe that, by the time Einstein presented his equations of general relativity on 25 November 1915 at the Berlin Academy of Sciences, David Hilbert had already […]