SIAM News arrived this afternoon and had an interesting story on the front page: Applying math to myth helps separate fact from fiction. In a nutshell, the authors hope to get some insight into whether a myth is based on…
Blog Archives
Baroque computers
From an interview with Neal Stephenson, giving some background for his Baroque Cycle: Leibniz [1646-1716] actually thought about symbolic logic and why it was powerful and how it could be put to use. He went from that to building a…
Fourier series before Fourier
I always thought that Fourier was the first to come up with the idea of expressing general functions as infinite sums of sines and cosines. Apparently this isn’t true. The idea that various functions can be described in terms of…
History of weather prediction
I’ve just started reading Invisible in the Storm: The Role of Mathematics in Understanding Weather. The subtitle may be a little misleading. There is a fair amount of math in the book, but the ratio of history to math is…
Size of ancient and modern bureaucracies
According to The History of Rome, episode 126, Diocletian increased the size of the Roman imperial bureaucracy from around 15,000 people to around 30,000. I wanted to compare the size of the bureaucracy that ran the Roman Empire to the…
Oldest series for pi
Here’s an interesting bit of history from Julian Havil’s new book The Irrationals. In 1593 Francois Vièta discovered the following infinite product for pi: Havil says this is “the earliest known.” I don’t know whether this is specifically the oldest…
Ancient understanding of tides
In his essay On Providence, Seneca (4 BC – 65 AD) says the following about tides: In point of fact, their growth is strictly allotted; at the appropriate day and hour they approach in greater volume or less according as…
The 1970s
Here’s a perspective on the 1970s I found interesting: The decade was so embarrassing that climbing out of the ’70s was a proud achievement. The 1970s were America’s low tide. Not since the Depression had the country been so wracked…
An algebra problem from 1798
The Lady’s Diary was a popular magazine published in England from 1704 to 1841. It contained mathematical puzzles such as the following, published in 1798. What two numbers are those whose product, difference of their squares, and the ratio or…
Reading historical math
I recently received review copies of two books by Benjamin Wardhaugh. Here I will discuss How to Read Historical Mathematics. The other book is his anthology of historical popular mathematics which I intend to review later. Here is the key…
Life off the clock
There was a lot of work to do a few generations ago, but the work wasn’t regulated by a clock. With the growth of industrial capitalism during the post-Civil War years, more and more Americans were feeling pressure to be…
Why the symbol for magnetic field is 'B'
I asked on Twitter the other day What is the historical reason for denoting magnetic filed “B”? Eric Eekhoff sent me an answer and with his permission I’m copying his email below: Hi John, I saw your question on your…
Stigler's law and Avogadro's number
Stigler’s law says that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer. Stigler attributed his law to Robert Merton, acknowledging that Stigler’s law obeys Stigler’s law. Avogadro’s number may be an example of Stigler’s law, depending on your perspective.…
25% of 18th century science
According to historian Clifford Truesdell, … in a listing of all of the mathematics, physics, mechanics, astronomy, and navigation work produced in the 18th century, a full 25% would have been written by Leonard Euler. Source Other posts about Euler:…
Never a time so completely parochial
“There never was a time when those that read at all, read so many books by living authors rather than books by dead authors. Therefore there was never a time so completely parochial, so completely shut off from the past.”…
