Math Nerds: They're Just Like Us
May. 25th, 2025 07:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
primeidealWhen I was an impressionable youth I read (and imprinted pretty hard on) a popular science book covering math history from olden times to the present day. One of the mathematicians that was namedropped for his 80s-90s-era discoveries is still active and doing research, so when I heard he was giving a seminar talk I definitely wanted to attend.
Well, this luminary started by fumbling his way through the slide show ("you advance it with the arrow keys" "which arrow keys? ...oh, these arrows.") Background about the history of Diophantine equations. "Now this is an old example, it goes all the way back to Fibonacci, in 'Liber quadratorum,' The Book of Squares. Published in 1225. Which is fitting...because that's a square, 35^2. There have been only ten square years since then, and we're in one right now!"
(45 is a triangular number, 45=1+2+3+...+9, and 45^2=2025. And that also means that 2025 = 1^3 + 2^3 + ... 9^3. Great year!)
Later he was showing us an example graph illustration (unit circle with a line intersecting it in two points, similar to this one), and after the back-and-forth with "how do I minimize the slide show," he pulled up the image, which was an Untitled file in Microsoft Paint. <3
Well, this luminary started by fumbling his way through the slide show ("you advance it with the arrow keys" "which arrow keys? ...oh, these arrows.") Background about the history of Diophantine equations. "Now this is an old example, it goes all the way back to Fibonacci, in 'Liber quadratorum,' The Book of Squares. Published in 1225. Which is fitting...because that's a square, 35^2. There have been only ten square years since then, and we're in one right now!"
(45 is a triangular number, 45=1+2+3+...+9, and 45^2=2025. And that also means that 2025 = 1^3 + 2^3 + ... 9^3. Great year!)
Later he was showing us an example graph illustration (unit circle with a line intersecting it in two points, similar to this one), and after the back-and-forth with "how do I minimize the slide show," he pulled up the image, which was an Untitled file in Microsoft Paint. <3
no subject
Date: 5/25/25 02:05 pm (UTC)What was the popular math/science book? I read all the popular math I could get my hands on when I was young, which was a fair amount as I had mathy parents and the public library, so there's a decent chance I've read it. (The books I really imprinted on were Mathematical People and More Mathematical People, which were collections of interviews with then-living mathematicians.)
no subject
Date: 5/25/25 05:44 pm (UTC)