Isaac Newton gave credit to his predecessors for his phenomenal vision and insight with the phrase that he was “standing on the shoulders of giants”. But just who were those giants? Foremost amongst them must have been Galileo, who formulated some fundamental mechanical principles that underlie Newton’s work in dynamics. But there were many others. The greatest English mathematician prior to Newton was John Wallis.
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Ducks & Drakes & Kelvin Wakes
Published May 18, 2013 Irish Times Leave a CommentTags: Applied Maths, History, Wave Motion
The theme of this week’s That’s Maths column in the Irish Times ( TM021 ) is Kelvin Wakes, the beautiful wave patterns generated as a duck or swan swims through calm, deep water or in the wake of a ship or boat.
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One of the most amazing and counter-intuitive results in mathematics was proved in 1924 by two Polish mathematicians, Stefan Banach and Alfred Tarski. Banach was a mathematical prodigy, and was the founder of modern functional analysis. Tarski was a logician, educated at the University of Warsaw who, according to his biographer, “changed the face of logic in the twentieth century” through his work on model theory.
The That’s Maths column in the Irish Times this week is about symmetry and group theory, and the possible link, through string theory, with the fundamental structure of the universe ( TM020 ).
In the arts, symmetry is intimately associated with aesthetic appeal. In science, it provides insight into the properties of physical systems.
How do leopards get their spots? Mathematics gives us a better answer than the one offered by Rudyard Kipling in Just So Stories. This is the topic of That’s Maths this week ( TM019 ).
![African Leopard (Panthera pardus pardus). [Image from Wikimedia Commons]](http://thatsmaths.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/leopard-mid-res.jpg)
African Leopard (Panthera pardus pardus). [Image from Wikimedia Commons]
Dis, Dat, Dix & Douze
Published April 18, 2013 Occasional Leave a CommentTags: Arithmetic, Number Theory
How many fingers has Mickey Mouse? A glance at the figure shows that he has three fingers and a thumb on each hand, so eight in all. Thus, we may expect Mickey to reckon in octal numbers, with base eight. We use decimals, with ten symbols from 0 to 9 for the smallest numbers and larger numbers denoted by several digits, whose position is significant. Thus, 47 means four tens plus seven units.
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Pythagoras goes Global
Published April 11, 2013 Occasional Leave a CommentTags: Pythagoras, Spherical Trigonometry
Spherical trigonometry has all the qualities we expect of the best mathematics: it is beautiful, useful and fun. It played an enormously important role in science for thousands of years. It was crucial for astronomy, and essential for global navigation. Yet, it has fallen out of fashion, and is almost completely ignored in modern education.
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