I’ve been teaching an on-line History of Math course (with a HUM humanities prefix) this term. The posts for that course are here. The most recent post was about the French mathematicians of the 17th century – Viète, Mersenne, Fermat, Descartes and Pascal. French Mathematics of the 17th century Francois Viète (1540-1603) Francois Viète was [...]
Archive for the ‘Math History’ Category
History of Math
Posted in History of Algebra, Math History, Number Theory on March 6, 2011 | 1 Comment »
Benoit Mandelbrot (1924-2010)
Posted in Applications, Math History on October 18, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Benoit Mandelbrot A Greek among Romans Benoit Mandelbrot passed away last week in Cambridge, Mass. at the age of 85. Nassim Nicholas Taleb dedicated his book The Black Swan to Mandelbrot, calling him “a Greek among Romans.” Mandelbrot is probably the most important mathematician of the last 50 years. His ideas on using mathematics [...]
The Mathematics of Peak Oil
Posted in 19th Century Mathematicians, Applications, Math History on June 1, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
I gave a one-hour talk on the The Mathematics of Peak Oil on May 18th. The power point slides from the talk are here.
Things I’ve been working on…
Posted in 19th Century Mathematicians, Algebra, Applications, Math History on March 3, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
A presentation on M. King Hubbert‘s adaptation of Pierre Verhulst‘s logistic function to model oil production. The proof that a paraboloid of revolution reflects parallel waves to a single point. How to calculate distance between two locations on a sphere given latitude and longitude.
René Descartes and Friday the 13th
Posted in Applications, History of Algebra, Math History on November 30, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
What do René Descartes and Friday the 13th have to do with each other? A few years ago, I read the book The Mystery of the Aleph by Amir Aczel and enjoyed it immensely. In this book, he tells the story of Georg Cantor and his efforts to comprehend and mathematize infinity. I recently picked [...]
Logicomix
Posted in 19th Century Mathematicians, Math History, Mathematical Logic, Set Theory on October 16, 2009 | 3 Comments »
I read a review of the graphic novel Logicomix in the New York Times recently. Logicomix is a graphic novel that dramatizes the work and lives of some of the most important mathematical logicians of the late 19th and early 20th century. A review in the Financial Times explains: First among them is Bertrand Russell, [...]
Kronecker on the Complex Plane
Posted in 19th Century Mathematicians, Complex Analysis, Math History on June 14, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Analysis does not owe its really significant successes of the last century to any mysterious use of √(-1), but to the quite natural circumstance that one has infinitely more freedom of mathematical movement if he lets quantities vary in a plane instead of only on a line. Leopold Kronecker, (1894) quoted in Remmert’s Theory of [...]
The Complex Plane
Posted in Complex Analysis, Math History on June 12, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Gentlemen, this is surely true, it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don’t know what it means. But we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth. -Benjamin Pierce, American mathematician As we saw in the last post, using the Real Number system can lead to equation whose [...]
The General Quintic Equation
Posted in History of Algebra, Math History on December 8, 2008 | 3 Comments »
After the development of the Cubic and Quartic Formulas during the early to mid 1500s, mathematicians all over Europe worked to discover a formula for solving the general quintic equation, an equation of the form x5+bx4+cx3+dx2+ex+f=0. For 250 years they failed. During the early 1800s, two mathematicians began their brief careers and each would prove, [...]
Solving the Cubic
Posted in History of Algebra, Math History on November 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Italy was a center of mathematical activity after the publication of Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci (1202) and the Treviso Arthmetic of 1478. These books formed the foundation for European mathematics. At some point in the early 1500′s, an Italian mathematician named Scipione del Ferro determined a general solution for what is known as the depressed cubic [...]
