Today, we’re exploring quasicrystals, what they are, how an “impossible” pattern was found in a lab, how it became the catalyst to rewriting textbooks, and why this exotic order matters for real‑world technologies from wear‑resistant coatings to photonics. I’m Gabrielle Birchak, and this is Math! Science! History! Imagine holding a metal that seems to obey rules nature once forbid. You
Imagine it’s Friday evening, and the whole family is getting hangry (that is a combination of hungry and angry), and they all want to order pizza. So, you call your local pizzeria and…
Have you ever been stuck trying to remember a long number? Want to know how to memorize it?
Francois Viète’s cryptanalysis marked a turning point in the French Wars of Religion, but his genius methods weren’t as complex as one might think.
A brilliant mathematician once wrote, “For a person of intelligence is well equipped to solve the problems of life… we must have some defined aim in life and be able to fill competently that position in which we may find ourselves… let each defeat be a source of a new endeavor and each victory the strengthening of our spirit of
Omar Khayyam was an interdisciplinary thinker. He was a mathematician, a philosopher, a political advisor, and a famous poet. This is his story.
My last post was about the life of Évariste Galois and his contributions to abstract algebra. Between that podcast and my recent addiction to Rummikub, this thought process then led me, or distracted me, to thinking about number sets and groups. These mathematicians have written about groups, then about swimming, and the current Olympic trials for swimming, which then conveniently led me back to abstract algebra, which was the topic of my last post on Evariste Galois. My brain went full circle!
Galois was murdered the early morning of May 30. He was only 22. For the brief years in which he practiced mathematics, his theories revolutionized the foundations of abstract algebra.
I have good hope that there is something after death. This is a quote by Plato that I chose to use for the first chapter of my recently published book, Hypatia: The Sum of Her Life. This quote is so profound to me because her legacy continued to live on after Hypatia’s death. Some were negative, some were propaganda, and