Does light have weight? Newton thought that light was influenced by gravity and, using his laws of motion, we can calculate how gravity bends a light beam. The effect is observable during a total eclipse of the sun: photographs of the sky are compared with the same region when the sun is elsewhere and a … Continue reading Light Weight (*)
Month: October 2014
Waring’s Problem & Lagrange’s Four-Square Theorem
$latex \displaystyle \mathrm{num}\ = \square+\square+\square+\square &fg=000000$ Introduction We are all familiar with the problem of splitting numbers into products of primes. This process is called factorisation. The problem of expressing numbers as sums of smaller numbers has also been studied in great depth. We call such a decomposition a partition. The Indian mathematician Ramanujan proved … Continue reading Waring’s Problem & Lagrange’s Four-Square Theorem
Old Octonions may rule the World
This week’s That’s Maths column in The Irish Times (TM055, or search for “thatsmaths” at irishtimes.com) is about octonions, new numbers discovered by John T Graves, a friend of William Rowan Hamilton. On this day in 1843, the great Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton discovered a new kind of numbers called quaternions. Each quaternion has … Continue reading Old Octonions may rule the World
Triangular Numbers: EYPHKA
The maths teacher was at his wits' end. To get some respite, he set the class a task: Add up the first one hundred numbers. “That should keep them busy for a while”, he thought. Almost at once, a boy raised his hand and called out the answer. The boy was Carl Friedrich Gauss, later … Continue reading Triangular Numbers: EYPHKA
Algebra in the Golden Age
This week’s That’s Maths column in The Irish Times (TM054, or search for “thatsmaths” at irishtimes.com) is about the emergence of algebra in the Golden Age of Islam. The Chester Beatty Library in Dublin has several thousand Arabic manuscripts, many on mathematics and science. "The ink of a scholar is holier than the blood of … Continue reading Algebra in the Golden Age
