Applied Statistics
The Lacking Wisdom of Crowds
Implications of Condorcet’s jury theorem
Jørgen Veisdal
Abel
The Mozart of Mathematics — Niels Henrik Abel
“Although Abel shared with many mathematicians a complete lack of musical talent, I will not sound absurd if I compare his kind of…
Ramanujan
Ramanujan’s Early Work on Continued Fractions
“I had never seen anything in the least like [it] before” — G.H. Hardy On or about the 31st of January 1913, mathematician G.H. Hardy (1877-1947) of Trinity College at Cambridge University received a parcel of papers from Madras, India. The package included a cover letter where a young
Mathematics
The Martians of Budapest
The Martians of Budapest”, sometimes referred to as simply “The Martians” is a colloquial term used to describe a group of prominent Hungarian physicists and mathematicians who emigrated to the United States following the Great Purge of 1933.
Analysis
Cantor’s Diagonal Argument
“Diagonalization seems to show that there is an inexhaustibility phenomenon for definability similar to that for provability” — Franzén…
Feynman
Richard Feynman’s First Lecture (1940)
“I went through fire on my first.” While still a graduate student at Princeton University in 1940, Richard P. Feynman (1918–1988) gave his first lecture in a seminar on electrodynamics, the topic that would eventually earn him the 1965 Nobel Prize in physics. In front of a prestigious audience
Gödel
Kurt Gödel's Brilliant Madness
Hungarian polymath John von Neumann (1903–1957) once wrote that Kurt Gödel was “absolutely irreplaceable” and “in a class by himself”.
Ramanujan
Ramanujan’s First Letter to G.H. Hardy (1913)
On or about the 31st of January 1913, mathematician G.H. Hardy (1877-1947) of Trinity College at Cambridge University received a parcel of papers from Madras, India which included a cover letter from an aspiring young Indian mathematician by the name of Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920).
Game Theory
The El Farol Bar Problem
“Oh that place. It’s so crowded nobody goes there anymore.” — Yogi Berra
Physics
The Einstein-Szilárd Letter (1939)
The now famous Einstein-Szilárd letter was written at the initiative of Hungarian nuclear physicist Leó Szilárd with help from Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner in 1939.
Feynman
Richard Feynman’s Advice to a Young Stephen Wolfram (1985)
«You don’t understand “ordinary people”. To you they are “stupid fools”» Entrepreneur Stephen Wolfram is a unique egg. By age 14, he had written three books on particle physics. He earned his Ph.D. at age 20 and began publishing research papers at the age of 18, some of
Mathematics
The Duties of John von Neumann’s Assistant in the 1930s
The year is 1933. A 26 year-old former graduate student at Columbia University, Edgar R. Lorch (1907–1990) has just completed his Ph.D. in mathematics and is, in his own words “by some miracle” awarded a National Research Council Fellowship for a year of postdoctoral studies at Harvard University.
von Neumann
John von Neumann’s 1935 letter to Oswald Veblen
Mathematical Gossip
Prime Numbers
The Twin Prime Conjecture
Are there infinitely many primes p such that p + 2 is prime?
Grothendieck
The Anarchist Abstractionist — Who was Alexander Grothendieck?
Mathematician Alexander Grothendieck was born in 1928 to anarchist parents who left him to spend the majority of his formative years with foster parents.
Mathematics
The Mathematics of Ted Kaczynski
Before terrorist Theodore John Kaczynski (1942-) began sending mail-bombs to faculty members at various American universities, he had a promising career in mathematics.