School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews, Scotland's First University;
'αἰὲν ἀριστεύειν'-
Ever to Excel
MacTutor History of Maths
Quote of the Day
Vladimir Arnold (1937 - 2010)
🧵
"All mathematics is divided into three parts: cryptography (paid for by CIA, KGB and the like) hydrodynamics (supported by manufacturers of atomic submarines)...
On this day in 1905, Albert Einstein published his analysis of Planck's quantum theory and its application to light. It was for this work that Einstein was awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 1921.
11.V
Quote of the Day
Richard Feynman 🇺🇸 (1918 - 1988)
"To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature ...
On this day in 1686 the publication of Newton's Principia was arranged in London at the Royal Society. The minutes of the meeting record that the astronomer Edmund Halley would "undertake the business of looking after it and printing it at his own charge"
12.V
Our (first) Mathematician of the Day on Women in Maths Day is Maryam Mirzakhani 🇮🇷 the first woman to be awarded a Fields Medal. She worked in the geometry of Riemann surfaces.
#WomeninMaths
#May12WIM
Quote of the Day III
Grigori Perelman
"'I'm not interested in money or fame, I don't want to be on display like an animal in a zoo. I'm not a hero of mathematics. I'm not even that successful; that is why I don't want to have everybody looking at me.'"
8.I
Article of the Day
"Simple mathematical models with very complicated dynamics"
Robert M. May
#mathematicianoftheday
Nature volume 261, pages 459–467 (1976)
On this day in 1902, Bertrand Russell wrote to Gottlob Frege to say that in his Grundgesetze der Arithmetik:
"... there is just one point where I have encountered a difficulty."
The difficulty was the Russell Paradox.
Programming Language of the Day
Pascal
#mathematicianoftheday
"Pascal is an imperative and procedural programming language, designed by Niklaus Wirth..."
Our Mathematician of the Day is Artur Ávila a Brazilian mathematician who has made deep contributions to dynamical systems theory which has transformed the subject. He has been awarded numerous prizes e.g. Fields Medal in 2014.
13.VIII
On this day in 2013, Maryam Mirzakhani [ مریم میرزاخانی ] became the first woman to be awarded a Fields Medal:
"... for her outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces."
9.VII
Our Mathematician of the Day is Elon Lima 🇧🇷 famed as the most famous mathematics textbook writer in Portuguese. Also made important contributions in topology and was a major contributor to the Brazilian Mathematics Colloquium between 1961-1983.
Our (second) Mathematician of the Day is John Nash was an American mathematician who won the Nobel Prize for Economics for his work in game theory. He achieved fame through the film "A Beautiful Mind".
Our (third) and final Mathematician of the Day is Grigori Perelman [Григорий Яковлевич Перельман] a Russian mathematician who proved the Poincaré Conjecture and who refused to accept a Fields Medal or the $1 000 000 Clay Prize.
17.XI
Article of the Day
Wigner, E. P. (1960). "The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences. Richard Courant lecture in mathematical sciences delivered at New York University, May 11, 1959". Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics. 13 (1): 1–14
2.IV
On this day in 1948 Kurt Gödel had his examination to become a United States citizen. Being the diligent individual that he was, he studied the constitution carefully beforehand and felt that he had found a contradiction.
22.IV
Quote of the Day
Michael Atiyah 🇱🇧🏴 (1929 - 2019)
"The most useful piece of advice I would give to a mathematics student is always to suspect an impressive sounding Theorem if it does not have a special case which is both simple and non-trivial."
8.VIII
Quote of the Day II
Roger Penrose
"Do not be afraid to skip equations (I do this frequently myself)."
[Preface to "The Road to Reality", (London, 2005)]
9.XII
On this day in 1911 Henri Poincaré wrote the editor of a mathematical journal to ask if, contrary to custom, an unfinished piece of work could be published. He explained that at his age he might not be able to finish it, but that his work might provide ideas for another.
28.V
On this day in 1555, John Dee was arrested and charged with "calculating". At this time mathematics in England was considered to be equivalent to the possession of magical powers. Aubrey writes that the authorities had:
20.XI
Our Mathematician of the Day is Benoit Mandelbrot 🇵🇱🇫🇷🇺🇸 who was largely responsible for the present interest in Fractal Geometry. He showed how Fractals can occur in many different places in both Mathematics and elsewhere in Nature.
@nntaleb
On this day in 1742, Leonard Euler claimed in a letter to Goldbach that prime numbers of the form 4n+ 1 are represented uniquely as a sum of two squares.
Algorithm of the Day
The Cooley–Tukey FFT algorithm
#mathematicianoftheday
"The Cooley–Tukey algorithm, named after J. W. Cooley and John Tukey, is the most common fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithm."
21.III
Transform of the Day
Fourier Transform
#mathematicianoftheday
"The Fourier transform (FT) is a transform that converts a function into a form that describes the frequencies present in the original function."
On this day in 1637, the printing of René Descartes' "Discours de la Méthode" was completed, including its important appendix on Geometry in which he introduced the Cartesian coordinate system.
9.XII
On this day in 1911 Henri Poincaré wrote the editor of a mathematical journal to ask if, contrary to custom, an unfinished piece of work could be published. He explained that at his age he might not be able to finish it, but that his work might provide ideas for another.
12.IX
Our Mathematician of the Day is flaneur extraordinaire Nassim Nicholas Taleb
@nntaleb
a Lebanon-born American mathematician and statistician whose work concerns problems of randomness, probability and uncertainty.
15.I
Quote of the Day
Sofia Kovalevskaya 🇷🇺🇸🇪 (1850 - 1891)
"Many people who have not studied mathematics confuse it with arithmetic and consider it a dry and fruitless science. In reality, however, it is a science which requires a great amount of imagination."
On this day in 1877, Georg Cantor wrote to to Dedekind, announcing a proof that the points inside a square are in one-to-one correspondence with those on a line segment. Three years earlier, Cantor had intimated that this was clearly impossible.
26.I
On this day in 1697, Isaac Newton received Johann Bernoulli's brachistochrone problem. According to Newton's biographer Conduitt, he solved the problem in an evening after returning home from the Royal Mint. Newton:
10.I
Quote of the Day
Donald Knuth 🇺🇸 (1938 - )
"The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language."
On this day in 1925 David Hilbert said:
"No one shall expel us from the paradise which Cantor created for us,"
in an address to the Westphalian Mathematical Society in Münster in honour of Karl Weierstrass.
Quote of the Day
Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662)
"We are usually convinced more easily by reasons we have found ourselves than by those which have occurred to others."
[Pensées (1670)]
5.IV
On this day in 1955, Bertrand Russell sent a letter to Albert Einstein with a rough draft of what would soon be known as the Russell-Einstein Manifesto
9.III
On this day in 1736. Leonard Euler received a letter from the mayor of Danzig (now Gdańsk in Poland) challenging him to solve the Königsburg Bridge Problem.
5.V
On this day in 1777, Leonhard Euler was the first to use the symbol i for √−1 in the paper "De Formulis Differentialibus Angularibus maxime irrationalibus quas tamen per logarithmos et arcus circulares integrare licet"
13.VIII
On this day in 2013, Maryam Mirzakhani became the first woman to be awarded a Fields Medal:
"... for her outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces."
@FieldsInstitute
31.III
On this day in 1952, Alan Turing was tried as a homosexual, offering no defence other than that he saw nothing wrong in his actions. Found guilty, he was given the alternatives of prison or oestrogen injections for a year.
23.III
Theorem of the Day II
Noether's Theorem
#mathematicianoftheday
#MOTD
"Noether's theorem states that every continuous symmetry of the action of a physical system with conservative forces has a corresponding conservation law."
30.V
On this day in 1832, Évariste Galois fought a duel with Perscheux d'Herbinville, the reason for the duel not being clear. He was wounded in the duel and was abandoned by d'Herbinville and his own seconds and found by a peasant.
11.III
Our Mathematician of the Day is Louis Bachelier a French 🇫🇷 mathematician who is credited with being the first person to model the stochastic process now called Brownian motion.
@LouisBachelier
@nntaleb
#FinancialMathematics
23.II
Quote of the Day
Carl Friedrich Gauss 🇩🇪🍺🥨 (1777 - 1855)
"If others would but reflect on mathematical truths as deeply and continuously as I have, they would make my discoveries."
24.IX
Quote of the Day
Raoul Bott (1923 - 2005)
"There are two ways to do great mathematics. The first is to be smarter than everybody else. The second way is to be stupider than everybody else -- but persistent."
20.II
Quote of the Day
Ludwig Boltzmann 🇦🇹 (1844 - 1906)
"A mathematician will recognise Cauchy, Gauss, Jacobi or Helmholtz after reading a few pages, just as musicians recognise, from the first few bars, Mozart, Beethoven or Schubert."
Quote of the Day
Maurits Escher (1898 - 1972)
"The laws of mathematics are not merely human inventions or creations. They simply 'are'; they exist quite independently of the human intellect.
17.XI
On this day in 1930 Kurt Gödel's "On formally undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and related systems" was received for publication. It contained the result that there are true but unprovable statements in arithmetic.
12.V
Our (second) Mathematician of the Day
#MOTD2
is Maryam Mirzakhani an Iranian mathematician who worked in America. She was the first woman to be awarded a Fields Medal (2014). She worked in the geometry of Riemann surfaces.
11.III
Our Mathematician of the Day is Louis Bachelier a French mathematician who is credited with being the first person to model the stochastic process now called Brownian motion (part of his doctoral thesis "Théorie de la spéculation", 1900)
@nntaleb
11.IV
Seminal Landmark Breakthrough Paper of the Day
Wiles, Andrew (1995).
#mathematicianoftheday
"Modular elliptic curves and Fermat's Last Theorem". Annals of Mathematics. 141 (3): 443–551.
30.IV
On this day in 1807, Gauss wrote to Sophie Germain for the first time since being aware she was a woman, (She had formally written using the name Monsieur LeBlanc). In a letter with much praise, he writes:
Book of the Day 📗
"An Elementary Treatise on Differential Equations and their Applications"
H.T.H. Piaggio
#mathematicianoftheday
1920. (Bell’s Mathematical Series, Advanced Section.)
28.XII
Seminal Paper of the Day
von Neumann, John (1966).
#mathematicianoftheday
#MOTD
Arthur W. Burks (ed.). "Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata."
Urbana and London: University of Illinois Press.
29.IX
On this day in 1801, Gauss's Disquisitiones Arithmeticae was published. Gauss was only 24 years old at that time and had written it when he was 21.
15.II
On this day in 1675, Isaac Newton wrote to Robert Hooke:
"What Descartes did was a good step ... If I have seen further it is by standing on the sholders of Giants."
1.IV
On this day in 1975, Martin Gardner published an April's Fool hoax in Scientific American which claimed that Ramanujan had conjectured in a 1914 paper that e^π{\sqrt{163}} is an integer. In fact it is 262 537 412 640 768 743.9999999999992500 ...
Quote of the Day
Alan Turing (1912 - 1954)
"A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human."
9.V
On this day in 1831, during a dinner to celebrate his acquittal on a charge of attempting to overthrow the government, Évariste Galois raised his glass and with an open dagger in his hand appeared to make threats against the French king, Louis-Phillipe.
3.IV
On this day in 1753, Leonard Euler wrote to Christian Goldbach to say that he had confirmed Goldbach's conjecture that every odd integer could be written as 2n^2 + p with p a prime for the the first 2500 integers.
28.VII
On this day in 1899, Cantor asked Dedekind whether the set of all cardinal numbers is itself a set, because, if it is, it would have a cardinal number larger than any other cardinal.
13.VIII
On this day in 2013, Maryam Mirzakhani became the first woman to be awarded a Fields Medal
"...for her outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces."
Quote of the Day
Siméon Denis Poisson 🇫🇷 (1781 - 1840)
"Life is good for only two things, discovering mathematics and teaching mathematics."
[ Mathematics Magazine, v. 64, no. 1, Feb. 1991. ]
24.IX
Quote of the Day
Raoul Bott 🇭🇺🇺🇸 (1923 - 2005)
"There are two ways to do great mathematics. The first is to be smarter than everybody else. The second way is to be stupider than everybody else -- but persistent."
8.XII
Matrix of the Day
A Hadamard Matrix
#mathematicianoftheday
#MOTD
"A Hadamard matrix, named after the French mathematician Jacques Hadamard, is a square matrix whose entries are either +1 or −1 and whose rows are mutually orthogonal."
Quote of the Day
Alan Turing (1912 - 1954)
"I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted."
17.VII
Our Mathematician of the Day is Terence Tao an Australian 🇦🇺🦘🐨 mathematician who won a Fields Medal in 2006 for his contributions to partial differential equations, combinatorics, harmonic analysis and additive number theory.
19.IV
On this day in 1760, Euler wrote the first of 263 letters to Princess Charlotte Ludovica Luisa, later collected as Letters to a German Princess. In the first letter Euler promised to produce:
15.II
Quote of the Day I
Richard Feynman 🇺🇸🍔🍟 (1918 - 1988)
"Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it."