Inside the entrance of the Boole Library, at Ireland’s University College in Cork, the watchful eyes of George Boole gaze down on visitors from the stern but kindly portrait that hangs in a place of honor.
Mathematics
Bust of George Boole at University College Cork • Photo by William Murphy (CC BY-SA 2.0)
C. Raymo Sr.'s slide rule • Photo by Tom Raymo
Reasonable guesses
Problem: A person wishes to build a square house with an area of 500 square feet. What should be the length of the side of the house?
A Mandelbrot set • Wolfgang Beyer (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Not a clock — a computer
A story by Barry Cipra in [the Mar. 25, 1988] issue of “Science” draws attention to a looming “crisis in mathematics.” The crisis has to do with the teaching of calculus, the branch of mathematics that has long been the cornerstone of education in science and engineering.
Excerpt from a notebook of Ramanujan (Public Domain)
A legacy of genius on scraps of paper
In 1913, the famous English mathematician G. H. Hardy received a letter from an unknown Hindu clerk in Madras, India, named Srinivasa Ramanujan. Attached to the letter were more than a hundred mathematical theorems, stated without any indication of how they they were derived.
Photo by dylan nolte on Unsplash
Random numbers that aren’t
Thirty years ago, at about the time I began to study science, I came across a book called “A Million Random Digits.” Here, in a volume as thick as the Boston telephone directory, were page after page of numbers with no apparent pattern. No matter how long you studied the numbers, there was no way to predict what digit would occur next.