What is the Fields Medal? It is a four-yearly prize given to mathematicians under the age of 40. It is the mathematical equivalent of the Nobel Prize. It is named after a Canadian mathematician called John Charles Fields. The prize is a medal, similar-looking to the Nobel Prize medal, and 15,000 Canadian dollars, which, as
#851 What is the Fields Medal? Read More »
On the Shoulders of Giants #1 Euclid was an ancient Greek mathematician. He is most famous for his book “The Elements”. He probably lived in the City of Alexandria in about 300 BC, but there is not much reliable historical evidence for his existence. All of the records about him were written several centuries later.
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Who invented the slide rule? Willian Oughtred in 1622. I think, first, I need to look at what a slide rule is because not many people under 60 will have ever used one. These days, if we want to do complex calculations, we can just plug them in to our phone and get the answer
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Why are there twelve months in a year? Because it is the closest match to the number of times the moon orbits the Earth in a year. Before there were names for the months, people lived by a lunar calendar. There was no need to know what month it was or what day it was.
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Where did Arabic numerals come from? They evolved from a writing system created in India in the 3rd century BC. The first evidence of prehistoric humans using numbers comes from a bone dated from 43,000 years ago. It is the Lebombo bone and it is a baboon femur with 29 notches carved into it.
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I learned this today. We have 24 hours in a day because of Hipparchus. We have 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour because of Claudius Ptolemy, Al-Biruni, and the Babylonians. Before we look at this topic, we have to remember that needing to know the time exactly is a fairly
I learned this today. The mathematical symbols + plus, – minus, x multiply, ÷ divide, and = equal are not as old as we think. Mathematics itself goes back a very long way. The idea of counting began with hunter-gatherer tribes. Presumably, they would have known how to talk about adding and subtracting parts of
#16 Where do the plus, minus, multiplication, and division symbols come from? Read More »
