Sunday, September 8

Math

Bernard Morin developed glaucoma at an early age and was blind by the time he was six years old. Despite his inability to see, Morin went on to become a master topologist—a mathematician who studies the intrinsic properties of geometric forms in space—and earned renown for his visualization of an inside-out sphere. For sighted people, […]

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At the Hotel Parco dei Principi in Rome, in September of 1973, the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős approached his friend Richard Guy with a request. He said, “Guy, veel you have a coffee?” It cost a dollar, a small fortune to a professor of mathematics at the hinterland University of Calgary who was not much […]

The early 19th century golfer Harry Vardon was the Tiger Woods of his day, and not just because he had marital difficulties. He even had a biography written about him, which recounted, among other things, how he handled losing his first child and living with tuberculosis. But Vardon’s life would be more useful to sports […]

I would cut off my right hand if you find it.” That was the guarantee retired Columbia history lecturer Jens Ulff-Møller made that there was no word for “million” in Old English, a medieval predecessor of the language you’re currently reading. Some Anglo-Saxon writers understood the idea of a million, and they had a term for it: a “thousand […]

If you think computers have gotten really good at solving problems—like voice recognition, or self-driving cars—then your mind would be blown by what they could do if P = NP. Internet cryptography would come crashing down. Voice and image recognition would become near-perfect. Mathematical proofs would be greatly simplified. The stock market would dramatically change. […]

Workers count votes at a polling place in Worcester, Mass.SuperStock via Getty Images Last Thursday the UK’s Conservative Party stomped to an electoral victory that fairly shocked the country. The Tories won a comfortable majority of seats in parliament, enabling them to govern the nation without a coalition partner. That result contrasted sharply with the […]

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