Monthly archives for July, 2019
Diagonalizing the Psalms
This post first appeared on scientificamerican.com.
As I was drifting off to sleep one night, I had one of those brilliant ideas that only comes along when you’re drifting off to sleep: diagonalizing the psalms. Earlier that day I had noticed that Psalm 119 was very long—longer than 119 verses, in fact—and wondered how many psalms from the Bo [...]
Parallels and Perpendiculars in the L...
This post first appeared at scientificamerican.com.
André Weil. Credit: Konrad Jacobs Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 2.0 DE)
A friend who recently defended his dissertation in comparative literature mentioned Simone Weil’s writing on the Iliad in his defense. Afterwards, I told him her brother André was a famous mathematician. (In my former field of re [...]
A Thousand Years of Congruent Numbers
This post originally appeared at scientificamerican.com.
On our most recent episode of My Favorite Theorem, my cohost Kevin Knudson and I talked with University of Montreal math professor Matilde Lalín about her favorite bit of math, the congruent number problem. (You can listen to the episode or read a transcript at kpknudson.com.)
A congrue [...]
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