few years ago, at a Las Vegas convention for magicians, Penn Jillette, of the act Penn and Teller, was introduced to a soft-spoken young man named Apollo Robbins, who has…
Poetry and Mathematics “We’ve already seen how Shakespeare changed everything and how Fibonacci, “the man of numbers,” changed the world. But in this short video, Professor Roger Bowley uses Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter and penchant…
For seven years, Paul Lockhart’s A Mathematician’s Lament enjoyed a samizdat-style popularity in the mathematics underground, before demand prompted its 2009 publication to even wider applause and debate. An impassioned critique of K–12…
Gerard Beirne, formerly of Winnipeg, combines his interests in science and art to produce Games of Chance: A Gambler’s Manual (Oberon, 110 pages, $19). The poems resemble, at times, mathematical…
For the day that is in it, an extract from my poem Pi Pi a circle seeking its measure (the relation of its diameter to its circumference) its inner to…
Joseph Priestly’s last defence of phlogiston: Gentlemen, Having drawn up a short defense of the doctrine of phlogiston, I take the liberty of inscribing it to you, as the principal advocates for…