Fermat's Library

Paul Erd?s was born exactly 112 years ago. "A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems"

This handwritten letter featuring the famous E=mc2 was sold for $1.2M. In this week's paper, Ryan Dahn explores what Einstein’s handwriting tells us about the man himself. Here's the annotated paper: https://lnkd.in/d3n5E-b5

Joseph Liouville was born exactly 216 years ago. In 1844, he became the first person to prove the existence of transcendental numbers — numbers that are not roots of any non-zero polynomial equation with integer coefficients — and provided the first explicit decimal examples, such as the Liouville constant.

A beautiful plot created by Jahnke and Emde in 1933, before the advent of computers, featured in their book Tables of Functions with Formulae and Curves.

Here's an example when scientists were wrong - and the outsider was right In Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Jonathan Swift mocked British scientists for failing to solve the Longitude Problem: how to track your east-west position within a mile after crossing the Atlantic. It was the great scientific challenge of the 18th century. Parliament offered ￡20,000 - worth millions today - for a solution, entrusting the Royal Observatory to award the prize. In 1731, a self-taught clockmaker, John Harrison, cracked it. The astronomers didn’t believe him. For 40 years, Harrison refined his invention while the Observatory stonewalled. Only in 1773 - by act of Parliament - did he finally receive the prize and east-west navigation could be made safe.

That’s how close a human once came to Mars on August 2003 — the closest in 60,000 years. Closer than the Apollo astronauts. This was due to a rare alignment between Earth and Mars known as perihelic opposition - we won't get this close again until 2287.

Mars' Olympus Mons, the tallest known volcano in the solar system, has such a gradual slope that someone standing at the base couldn't see the summit because it's beyond the horizon.

This week’s paper explores how slime mold can inspire better network design. Atsushi Tero and his team explore how the slime mold Physarum polycephalum can inspire more efficient and adaptive networks. Just as neural networks mimic the brain and genetic algorithms draw from evolution, this research applies biology to solve complex network challenges. Paper here: https://lnkd.in/dv4CBMnz

Here's a great photo of the ISS by J. Mccarthy. The reason why the ISS keeps its relative size against both the Sun and the Moon is due to a remarkable coincidence: the diameter of the Moon is 400x smaller than the diameter of the Sun, but it is also 400x closer to us!

Richard Feynman's pranks at Los Alamos "Feynman drove security personnel to distraction when he went on a nighttime safecracking spree, opening the combination locks for secret file cabinets all over the laboratory. On another occasion, he noticed a hole in the fence surrounding Los Alamos - so he walked out the main gate, waved to the guard, and then crawled back through the hole and walked out the main gate again. He repeated this several times. Feynman was almost arrested. His antics became part of Los Alamos lore"