Diff for "SecretNumbers"

• http://wiki.keithl.com/SecretNumbers

The Secret Lives of Numbers

A Hidden History of Math's Unsung Trailblazers

• Kate Kitagawa & Timothy Revell . 2024 . 510.9 KITAGAWA . Hillsboro Library-

• Timothy Revell executive editor of New Scientist

• Kate Kitagawa personal website

• p001 Prelude

• p007 Chapter 1 - In the Beginning

• p020 Chapter 2 - The Turtle and the Emperor

• p031 I Ching inspired Leibniz binary math

• p039 humblebrag

• 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 )

• p089 Chapter 6 - The House of Wisdom

• 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 DescartesCartesian 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

• p190 Chapter 12 - Revolutions

• 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

• p221 Chapter 14 - Mapping the Stars

• 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

• p265 Notes

• p271 David-H-Blackwell

• p273 Further Readings

• p285 Index