Uncategorized
- Math
Turn of the Screw
“What we are told about Archimedes is a mix of a few hard facts and many legends,” Sherman Stein of the University of California, Davis notes in his book Archimedes: What Did He Do Besides Cry Eureka? A three-bladed Archimedes screw. Courtesy of Chris Rorres. I was reminded of that statement when my son Kenneth […]
- Math
Conquering Catalan’s Conjecture
Innocent-looking problems involving whole numbers can stymie even the most astute mathematicians. As in the case of Fermats last theorem, centuries of effort may go into proving such tantalizing, deceptively simple conjectures in number theory. Now, Preda Mihailescu of the University of Paderborn in Germany finally may have the key to a venerable problem known […]
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