Timothy Gowers Speaks at CMI (year 2000)

Timothy Gowers received the Fields Medal for research on functional analysis and combinatorics in 1998. In the year 2000, he was the Keynote Speaker at the Clay Mathematics Institute where he spoke about various applications of mathematics in other areas such as computer science, finance and engineering. His speech is remarkably clear and easy to follow. You can watch his speech here..

 

History of Math Contest

The Mathematical Association of America has its eighth annual undergraduate student writing contest in the History of Mathematics. This contest is open to all undergraduate students. Deadline for submission is March 31st. More information (including 2010 winners’ papers) is available on the HOM SIGMAA website at http://www.homsigmaa.org/.

Fractal Geometry

Benoît Mandelbrot, the father of fractal geometry, died last Thursday at the age of 85. We will learn about fractal geometry in class when we get to the modern era.

You can read more about it here.

Archimedes Palimpsest

Palimpsest comes from the Greek word palimpsestos meaning "scraped again". It is a manuscript that has another text written over it. Around 1200 A.D., a Christian monk turned Archimedes' book into a new prayer book. In October 1998, it was sold for $2 million at an auction. You can watch the documentary that we saw in class about the story again here: part 1 , part 2 and part 3.

Since 1998, a group of scientists have been working on the recovery of the writings of the greatest mathematician of the ancient era. You can find up to date information here.

As well, you can find a digital copy of the recovered Archamides Palimpsest after the prayers are removed on google books.

Dangerous Knowledge

“Dangerous Knowledge” is a fascinating documentary by the BBC about the story of four masterminds, Goerg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. What do these four have in common?

Cantor created "set theory". Cantor’s Theorem says that there exist infinitely many infinite sets of different cardinalities. The theory was nonsense and shocking to some of the mathematicians of his time and it created a lot of opposition. Some philosophers saw his theory as a challenge to the uniqueness of “God”, the absolute infinity. Cantor is also known for the Continuum Hypothesis which states that there is no set with cardinality between the cardinality of natural numbers and of real numbers. (We will go over Cantor’s Theorem and the Continuum Hypothesis in detail in class). Cantor could neither prove nor disprove the Continuum Hypothesis. In 1940 and 1960 respectively, Kurt Gödel and Paul Cohen showed that, in fact, one cannot prove or disprove this hypothesis using the set theory axioms. Gödel is best known for his Incompleteness Theorem which states one cannot find a complete and consistent set of axioms for all mathematics. This gave a negative answer to Hilbert’s second problem. If you would like to know more about Cantor, Gödel, Boltzmann and Turing, watch this 90 minute documentary!

Numeral Systems

In the last few weeks we learned about various numeral systems from Babelonian to Hindu/Arabic numerals. In this interesting video you can watch a summary and more ...

Is there a meaning to Beckham's wearing jersey number 23?

If the title of the post interested you enough to find out, read the short essay by Marcus du Sautoy, professor of mathematics and a soccer fan. 23 seems to be the number of choice for other sport celebrities and world figures like Michael Jordan or Pope John XXIII. Nature also gave us 23 pairs of chromosomes. And let's not forget that according to historical records Julius Caesar was stabbed 23 times, which most likely was a pure coincidence and not a deliberate counting by the assassins.  So, what's so special about number 23?
________________________________________
Beckham in his prime

See also an interactive resource to learn through games all about prime numbers.