I think maps are really interesting, and often I think the older ones are the best. This is a picture of the very oldest known map of the world, and it comes from the ancient Babylonian civilization (700-500 BCE). Maps are by nature symbolic representations, and so looking at how the cartographer imagined the space […]
This is a 16th century translation of “The Emerald Tablet”, among the most famous texts on alchemy ever. Although it purports to be from Egypt (that’s where a lot of medieval alchemists thought their sources originated), the first text we know of comes from an Arabic 6th/7th century source. Isaac Newton, himself an occultist, translated
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This is Plympton 322, and this mathematical tablet written in cuneiform has been studied a lot to work out how much the Babylonians understood trigonometry. I love how much we still can learn and study about the history of math!
Fibonacci was an early 13th-century Italian who made Europeans aware that the Arabic number system we use today is much better for doing math than the Roman Numeral system medieval people had been using. Plus he wrote out the Fibonacci numbers, which are shown here in his most important book, _Liber Abaci_ (Book of Calculations).
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M.C. Escher, “Angels and Demons,” part of a series called “Capturing Infinity,” 1960. Escher worked on consultations with several mathematicians to develop much of his artwork.
I would have liked to have met this man, who was as eccentric as this visage here implies. This is none other than Paul Erdös, a Hungarian mathematician who published more papers than any other to date (over 1,500) and worked with so many other scholars (he co-authored with over 500) that math geeks know
