At Uncertain Principles Chad Orzel has an amusing and highly informative post on the mathematical theory* of close packing based on his experiences of the amount of milk left in his bowl depending on which breakfast cereal he eats. Now the reader could be forgiven for thinking that this subject has nothing to do with [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘History of Mathematics’
September 22, 2009
Riffing on an Algorithm
The estimable Thom Levenson author of the excellent Newton and the Counterfeiter, has a piece at The Inverse Square Blog on what he sees as the decline of the Atlantic Monthly; not a subject that would normally cause me to comment here but he includes a justified dismissal of the Atlantic’s abuse of the word [...]
August 6, 2009
A Confusion of Bernoullis!
Today is the 342nd birthday of Johann (Jean, John) Bernoulli (new style)* the younger of the famous Swiss Bernoulli brothers, who were not, for those that don’t know their history of maths, a country and western duo or a circus juggling act but were two of the most important European mathematicians at the end of [...]
