SecretNumbers - Keithl wiki

The Secret Lives of Numbers

p042 Chapter 3 - A Town Called Alex
p046 Pandrosion 4th century female mathematician in Alexandria
p047 Doubling the cube impossible with straightedge and compass
p047 Difference between theorem and proof, earliest recorded case of mansplaining
p048 Hipparchia
p049 Theon to daughter Hipparchia: "Reserve your right to think. For even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.

p057 Chapter 4 - The Dawn of Time
p060 Mayan Long Count Calendar ended 2012 December 21, some believed this predicted the end of the world. The Maya actually believed this was one of many rebirth cycles, nothing changed because of the measurement itse3lf
p060 Yazılıkaya religious sanctuary for hundreds of deities

p072 Chapter 5 - On the Origin(s) of Zero
p075 Jain math of large numbers, shirsa prahelika: 756e11 x (8.4e6)²⁸ (approx 5.7324601e208 )

p103 Chapter 7 - The Impossible Dream
p109 Republic of Letters 17th and 18th centuries, Europe/America
p111 Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat mathematical physicist elected to French Academy of Sciences in 1979 (age 55), died 2025 age 101
p111 Elisabeth of Bohemia
p115 Descartes Cartesian Coordinates
p115 Apollonius's problem
- given 3 circles, find eight more (book says one but diagram on page 116 shows 8) that are tangent to all three
p117 three algebraic equations, though third equation second term should be (y-y₃)²
p117 Descartes dedicated his 1644 Principles of Philosophy to Elisabeth
p117 Elisabeth corresponded with Anna Maria von Schurman Marie de Gournay and Katherine Jones / Lady Ranelagh

p118 Chapter 8 - The (First) Calculus Pioneers
p133 Leibnitz corresponded with mocking, indifferent Newton
- Newton developed calculus (fluxions 1666) years before Leibnitz independently did so (1675), but Leibnitz notation more useful and replaced fluxions. Britain adopted Leibniz notation in the 1820s, after decades falling behind continental mathematics
p138 in his 2009 book A Passage to Infinity George Gheverghese Joseph argues both Leibniz and Newton influenced by Kerala mathematicians

p139 Chapter 9 - Newtonianism for Ladies
p144 Descartes: Earth round. Newton, Earth Oblate Spheroid due to rotational centrifugal acceleration
p146 French meridian arc missions to Torneå in Northern Finland
p146 and Ecuador
- severe weather and deaths, three year project unfinished after nine years
p147 assistants and helpers abandoned, some spent 15 years trying to pay their way home
p149 Émilie du Châtelet conservation of energy 1740
p151 Laura Maria Caterina Bassi Veratti world's first female professor in 1732 at the University of Bologna

p157 Chapter 10 - A Grand Synthesis
p158 Xuanye, Kangxi Emperor longest reigning (61 years) Chinese emperor (from age 6)
- fascinated by western learning, particularly mathematics and astronomy
p163 took math lessons from Jesuit missionary Verbiest

p171 Chapter 11 - The Mathematical Mermaid
p171 Sophie Kowalevski (born Korvin-Krukovakaya) 1850-1891 Russian mathematics professor,
- first woman to earn mathematics doctorate in 1874. Died of flu complicated by pneumonia in 1891
p187 Steven Krantz book Mathematical Apocrypha: Stories and Anecdotes of Mathematicians and the Mathematical
- repeats heresay that Kowalevski had affair with colleague
- many academics emphasize her appearance more than her mathematics

p208 Chapter 13 - ∞
p217 David Blackwell candidate for UC Berkeley math department, but the wife of department head Griffith Evans said "she would not have that darky in my house".
- PhD Harvard 1910, faculty Rice University 1912-1934, where he met and married Rice student Isabel Mary John in 1917. Presumably Texas is where Mrs. Evans learned bigotry, like my mother's Texas stepmother.
- bio

p234 Chapter 15 - Number Crunching
p240 Ramanujan 1/pi formula adds 8 decimal digits per term
p244 Mary Lucy Cartwright chaos theory, president of London Mathematical Society, died 97yo
p247 Apartheid national policy of South Africa in 1948 (abolished 1990 to 1994)
p248 Stanley Skewes inspired Donna Strauss
p249 Skewes's number

p253 Epilogue
p257 Maryann Mirzakhani first woman to win a Fields Medal in 2014
- Norwegian Abel Prize, 29 awards from 2003 to 2026, one woman
p257 the magic wand theorem
- an oddly shaped room with perfect mirror walls; no dark spots
p259 Abel Prize offered for a lifetime of work
- Norwegian Abel Prize, 29 awards from 2003 to 2026
p259 one woman so far, Karen Uhlenbeck UT Austin emerita, b 1942
p261 7 Millennium Prize Problems
- Poincaré conjecture proved by Grigori Perelman built on
- Richard S. Hamilton theory of Ricci flow
p261 In 2013 Yitang Zhang showed there are infinitely many primes differing by 70 million or less
p261 Polymath8 project reduced that gap to 246
p262 Xuntian space telescope was due to launch in 2023, now planned for Q4 2026
- Field of view 300x larger than Hubble 40% of the sky, 2.5 gigapixel camera

p263 Acknowledgements
p263 Kate's UBC math teacher Bill Casselman
p264 Timothy's partner Emilie Steinmark Science Correspodent for The Economist, PhD experimental physics