The Greatest Formula in Mathematics

January 29th, 2010

It’s usually called Euler’s Identity, after the great Swiss mathematician Leonard Euler, and several polls of mathematicians and physicists have bestowed on it titles such as “the greatest equation ever”

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Newton Verifies the Law of Gravity

January 14th, 2010

Although much of Newton’s work is accessible only to specialists, some of his results can be understood and appreciated by the rest of us. In this post I will describe one such investigation – his effort to determine how the force of gravity decreases with distance from the earth. The results were very significant in a scientific sense, and the way he carried out the work shows astonishing insight and imagination.

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The Wonders of WolframAlpha

January 8th, 2010

It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation.    Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

 
I have often told students that becoming good at math is a lot like becoming good at a sport or at playing an instrument – practice is extremely important. Hours and hours of practice.

However, there is a [...]

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How Many Prime Numbers Are There?

November 24th, 2009

Are there an infinite number of prime numbers? Or maybe there is a largest prime number, and every number after that is composite. To get a little insight into this, we might start listing the prime numbers, beginning 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, …, to see if any pattern emerges. About all that is [...]

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How Math Ended Signal Distortion

October 3rd, 2009

On the morning of August 2, 1927, a young electrical engineer named Harold Black was riding the Lakawanna Ferry across the Hudson River on his way to work in Manhattan, where he was employed by Bell Laboratories. Black was pondering an important problem that he had wrestled with for several years without making any progress. [...]

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