This is a portrait of Emilie du Chatelet (d. 1749), a brilliant mathematician and physicist from the French Enlightenment. Multi-talented (by age twelve she knew six languages, she studied fencing and astronomy), Emilie supported her scientific interests like buying textbooks and lab equipment by using her math abilities to succeed at gambling. One of her […]
French Mathematician and Physicist – Emilie du Chatelet Read More »
Squint a bit, and you will be able to see things that look like white circles along a horizontal axis in the center of this photo. They are not raindrops, but six of the twenty-seven enormous radio telescopes that make up the Very Large Array. Located on a remote plain off Highway 60 in central
Very Large Array Telescopes of New Mexico Read More »
Great disoveries in mathematics and sciences ought to be celebrated, but a challenge for most of us non-specialists is understanding what exactly it is that we are supposed to be admiring. Amalie “Emmy” Noether (d. 1935) was, according to many great minds (such as Albert Einstein), the most important female mathematician in history. Her accomplishments
The Three Phases of Amalie “Emmy” Noether Read More »
Tomorrow, July 20, 2019, will mark the 50th anniversary of the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon: the module of the spacecraft called _Eagle_ settled on the _Sea of Tranquility_, a relatively smooth, basalt area of its surface. The poetic name Mare Tranquilitatis was coined by two astonomers: the first was the 17th-century scientist
Apollo 11 and the Mare Tranquilitatis Read More »
A strange relationship between mathematics and the occult began early on in Western history, and some of the most advanced intellectual minds fostered the study of numbers primarily as a stepping stone for understanding hidden truths about the physical world. This tendancy goes as far back as Pythagoras, but flourished notably in Early Modern Europe.
John Napier and the Relationship of Math and Occults Read More »
This is Seshat, the Ancient Egyptian Goddess of wisdom and writing. It is also the name of an extremely ambitious historical database run by Peter Turchin, a professor of evolutionary biology and a mathematician at the University of Connecticut. He is trying to collect big data about human civilizations in order to predict human behavior
Goddess Seshat and a Historical Database? Read More »
Here is a portrait of a young Sophie Germain, the French mathematician whose celebrated work involved the properties of elasticity and number theory (especially prime numbers). When we read about Germain, we quickly encounter a narrative that focuses on the multiple limitations placed on her life: her parents initially discouraged her scholarship, she was banned
Sophie Germain and Overcoming her Limitations Read More »
What drives us to learn? Are people with unusual intellectual capabilities also predisposed to want to use them? The case of Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718-1799) raises these questions, because she possessed a rarified mind in an era when women of her social class were expected to marry and attend to domestic affairs rather than academic
Maria Gaetana Agnesi and the Desire to Learn Read More »
These shapely flowers come from one of the most peculiar texts from the late 19th-century Western world. _Geometrical Psychology, or the Science of Representation_, by Louisa S. Cook, smashes together mathematics, evolution/eugenics, Vedanta Hinduism, and Spiritualism. Shakespeare is also in there too, for good measure. Cook’s aim was as ambitious as physicists today who are
Grand Unified Theory Read More »
Ada Lovelace (d. 1852) lived a supremely Victorian aristocratic life: multiple estates, famous friends, and noble title? :check. Tragic illnesses that caused her to be bedridden and/or die young? : check. Relatives concerned with her propriety despite having an adventurous and spirited personality? : also, check. Called “The Enchantress of Number” by her friend and
Ada Lovelace – “The Enchantress of Numbers” Read More »
No, you are not looking at a university student’s blue book . . . But you are seeing a very famous logical proof. This is an image of an early copy of the Medieval philosopher Anselm of Canterbury’s (1033-1109) _Proslogion_, and it used logic to try to prove something unimaginably perfect: the existence of God.His
Anselm of Canterbury’s “Proslogion” Read More »
This is _The New York Times_ 1907 headline that sensationalized a science experiment by a man named Duncan Macdougall. He had decided to run a macabre series of tests to see whether a human soul had weight. Six volunteers close to death agreed to spend their last breaths on a scale in his medical office,
Does A Human Soul Have Weight? Read More »
Alright, my brainy friends: it won’t take you but a New York minute to look at this diagram and figure out what’s wrong here.That’s right! The earth is in the middle of the entire universe, and of course we know that’s just silly. But such was the model of the cosmos bequeathed by the Ancient
Ancient Greek Theory of Geocentrism Read More »
Although other scientists are more famous for getting the astronomical idea of heliocentrism correct, Johannes Kepler (d. 1630) was much more successful than his peers at explaining super important aspects of our solar system (for instance, the planets go round the sun in ellipses). Who would have thought that a driving force behind his significant
Johannes Kepler’s Theory of Heliocentrism Read More »
Lucky you, readers: you get to look now at a page of one of the most important texts in recorded history – the _Almagest_, by Ptolemy. I’d say go ahead and fight me if you disagree, but our times call for gentler interaction with each other, so instead I will just try to convince you.Although
Ptolemy’s “The Almagest” Read More »
Here’s Sir Isaac Newton, sporting what looks like some pretty fantastic quarantine hair in his 46th year. Solitary, misanthropic, and quirky (he once experimented on optics by putting a needle deep into his eyesocket to see how his vision would change), Newton’s work on classical mechanics revolutionized how people understood the cosmos. We all can
Isaac Newton’s Blended Scientific and Occult World Views Read More »
We don’t need to wrestle with our beliefs to look at this image of a man undergoing bloodletting (about 1675) to know that this medical practice seems like a bad idea. Sure, the Ancient Greeks might have thought it could cure illnesses, but they had a totally incorrect idea that sickness originated in an imbalance
The Extended Use of Bloodletting Throughout History Read More »
In our final post in this week’s series on poisonings in history, I am featuring Alan Turing’s death by cyanide. Turing was, of course, the famous father of theoretical computer science, paving the way for Artificial Intelligence in his development of the “Turing machine,” a mathematical model of computation that enabled much of what we
Alan Turing’s Death by Cyanide Read More »
The two pictures shown here accompanied two of the most important “aha!” moments in history. The first is “Photo 51,” taken under the laboratory research of Rosalind Franklin. It shows an X-ray diffraction pattern of DNA, and Franklin, Watson, and Crick used it to figure out the molecular structure of life itself.The second is a
Famous Images From Science Read More »
Just last week (12 March 2021) a team of scholars that included a mathematician, a physicist, and a clockmaker (among others) unveiled an answer to one of the greatest puzzles in history — how the famed “Antikythera Mechanism” worked.Since 1901, when a diver off the coast of Greece (Antikythera, to be exact) found an unusual
The Inner-Workings of the “Antikythera Mechanism” Read More »
