Mathematics

How Isaac Newton Discovered the Binomial Power Series

Quanta Magazine: Isaac Newton was not known for his generosity of spirit, and his disdain for his rivals was legendary. But in one letter to his competitor Gottfried Leibniz, now known as the Epistola Posterior, Newton comes off as nostalgic and…

The AI Researcher Giving Her Field Its Bitter Medicine

Quanta Magazine: Anima Anandkumar, Bren Professor of computing at the California Institute of Technology and senior director of machine learning research at Nvidia, has a bone to pick with the matrix. Her misgivings are not about the sci-fi movies, but about…

A Numerical Mystery From the 19th Century Finally Gets Solved

Quanta Magazine: In the early 1950s, a group of researchers at the Institute for Advanced Study embarked on a high-tech project. At the behest of John von Neumann and Herman Goldstine, the physicist Hedvig Selberg programmed the IAS’s 1,700-vacuum-tube computer to…

Could learning algebra in my 60s make me smarter?

The Guardian: I don’t see how it can harm me now to reveal that I only passed math in high school because I cheated. I could add and subtract and multiply and divide, but I entered the wilderness when words became…