Maths, but not as you know it…
In the final part of my interview with Sir Michael Atiyah – one of his last ever before he passed away – he talks about some of his mathematical heroes, from Einstein and Newton to Brouwer and Michelangelo, including the most beautiful description of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel I’ve ever heard. A true giant of Mathematics, who is sorely missed.
With thanks to the Heidelberg Laureate Forum.
The third puzzle in the new feature from Tom Rocks Maths – check out the question below and send your answers to @tomrocksmaths on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or via the contact form on my website. The answer to the last puzzle can be found here.
Can you place the (extremely) famous mathematicians below in order of the year that they were born, earliest first? Bonus points for telling me what they studied.
WARNING: answer below image so scroll slowly to avoid revealing it accidentally.
b. Fermat: 1601-1665 – The French mathematician behind the infamous ‘Last Theorem’ written in the margins of his copy of Arithmetica in 1637. The theorem was finally shown to be true by Andrew Wiles 358 years later.
d. Newton: 1643-1727 – Most famous for his formulation of the Law of Gravity, but he also made significant contributions to geometry and is credited with developing calculus alongside Leibniz.
a. Euler: 1707-1783 – He worked on every almost every area of maths, but perhaps most famous for Euler’s number e=2.718… and Euler’s identity e iπ + 1 = 0.
c. Gauss: 1777-1855 – Like Euler, Gauss worked across all branches of maths and made significant contributions to Statistics with the Gaussian Distribution and physics with Gauss’ Flux Law.
Would it be better if we all spoke the same language? Live debate with Oxplore – Oxford University’s digital outreach portal. Watch me try to convince some linguists that Maths is indeed a language and also our best bet of communicating with aliens…
I strip back some of the most important equations in maths so that everyone can understand…
Newton’s Law of Gravity not only explained why apples fall to the ground, it also laid the foundations for modern-day physics by using equations to describe the world around us.
I strip back some of the most important equations in maths layer by layer so that everyone can understand…
This time it’s the turn of calculus – one of the most important equations in maths which is used to model almost everything in the universe…
