The father of modern rationalism, the man who told the world that the only thing we can be certain of is our own doubt, spent his final years hiding a secret 16-page manuscript written entirely in code.
The more I read, the more I discovered a man whose intellectual habits felt surprisingly modern. He questioned accepted narratives, examined primary sources, and deeply learned the mathematics he was studying. And the part that gets me is that he treated the people of antiquity not as legends, but as human beings deserving of careful understanding.
Today I’m feeling a bit sentimental, so I’m reposting my second podcast ever at Math Science History from 2019, about …
Sofia Kovalevskaya (1850–1891), Mathematician We start in 19th century Russia, with a woman who wasn’t supposed to exist, at least not in mathematics. Sofia Kovalevskaya grew up in a Russia where universities were closed to women entirely. Her solution was characteristically audacious: she arranged a marriage of convenience to obtain a passport, moved to Germany, and proceeded to become the
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTS Game theory is everywhere, from the moves you make in chess to the way countries negotiate treaties, from the strategies in our favorite video game to the decisions we make every day. But how did this field come to be? Who were the brilliant minds behind it, and what mathematical breakthroughs made it possible? Welcome to Math! Science!
It’s Flashcards Friday at Math! Science! History! I’m Gabrielle Birchak, your host. On Tuesday, we talked about the history of taxes, from ancient levies to modern systems, and how taxes have shaped governments, revolutions, and everyday life. Today, we’re staying with that theme, but on a more relatable level. This Flashcards Friday is about something many of us are feeling right
For most of history, governments taxed things you owned or traded: land, livestock, goods moving across a border, and windows in your house. The idea of taxing what you earn, your income, as a percentage, is
In 1993, science historian Margaret Rossiter introduced the term the Matilda Effect. Writing in the journal Social Studies of Science, Rossiter described a recurring pattern
In today’s episode, I give a historical account of the life of Haiti’s first female physician, Dr. Yvonne Sylvain, who fought for maternal care, cancer screening, and modern medical practice in the twentieth century.
Podcast transcripts Welcome to Math! Science! History! I’m Gabrielle Birchak, your host. For Women’s History Month, I wanted to feature one brilliant thing, one clean win, and one woman whose work still quietly runs the world, even if most of us do not realize it. Today’s “one brilliant thing” was a sorting system. A classification scheme. A way to take the universe,