Wednesday, September 29, 2010

You can't change the past, but you can ruin the present by worrying about the future.
--Anonymous

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Psalm 101:5-6

Whoever slanders his neighbor in secret,
him will I put to silence;
whoever has haughty eyes and a proud heart,
him will I not endure.

My eyes will be on the faithful in the land,
that they may dwell with me;
he whose walk is blameless
will minister to me.

Monday, September 20, 2010

Do not worry about your problems with mathematics,  
I assure you mine are far greater.

--Albert Einstein 

Friday, September 17, 2010

Math in Poetry

"Every minute dies a man, Every minute one is born;"  I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world's population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase.  I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows:  "Every moment dies a man, And one and a sixteenth is born."  I may add that the exact figures are 1.067, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre.  


--Charles Babbage, letter to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, about a couplet in his "The Vision of Sin"


Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Leonardo Bigollo Pisano (Fibonacci)

ca 1170-1245, Italy.
Fibonacci introduced new methods of arithmetic to Europe, and relayed the mathematics of the Hindus, Persians, and Arabs.  He re-introduced older Greek ideas like Mersenne numbers and Diophantine equations.  His work with congruums, which arose from the search for three square numbers in consecutive arithmetic series, has been called the finest in number theory before Fermat.  His writings cover a very broad range including new theorems of geometry, methods to construct and convert Egyptian fractions, irrational numbers, the Chinese Remainder Theorem, theorems about Pythagorean triplets, and the series 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, … which is now linked with the name Fibonacci.
Fibonacci provided Europe with the decimal system, algebra, and the ‘lattice’ method of multiplication.  He introduced notation like 3/5; his clever extension of this for quantities like 5 yards, 2 feet, and 3 inches is more efficient that today’s notation.  Before the decimal system, mathematicians had no notation for zero.  Leonardo ‘Fibonacci’ has been called “the most talented mathematician of the Middle Ages.”
Liber Abaci, written by Fibonacci, summarizes the decimal system in “the most important sentence ever written.”  There is no doubt that the Scientific Revolution owes a huge debt to Leonardo ‘Fibonacci’ Pisano.


Allen, James Dow.  “The Greatest Mathematicians.” 1998-2010.