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 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,
In 1975, a cat published a scientific paper. Yep, you read that right!
Quantum Computers and Brahmagupta — how do the two go together?