250 Most Intriguing Math Milestones

Shirleypal · Post by **Shirleypal** » 09-12-2009 10:17 AM

250 of the most intriguing mathematical milestones including:
Ant Odometer (c. 150 million B.C.) • Knots (c. 100,000 B.C.) • Ishango Bone (c. 18,000 B.C.) • Magic Squares (c. 2200 B.C.) • Pythagorean Theorem and Triangles (c. 600 B.C.) • Zeno's Paradoxes (c. 445 B.C.) • Euclid's Elements (300 B.C.) • Abacus (c. 1200) • Golden Ratio (1509) • Logarithms (1614) • Slide Rule (1621) • Pascal's Triangle (1654) • Discovery of Calculus (c. 1665) • Normal Distribution Curve (1733) • Fundamental Theorem of Algebra (1797) • Barycentric Calculus (1827) • The Mobius Strip (1858) • Riemann Hypothesis (1859) • Flatland (1884) • Proof of the Prime Number Theorem (1896) • Hairy Ball Theorem (1912) • Infinite Monkey Theorem (1913) • Geodesic Dome (1922) • Bourbaki: Secret Society (1935) • Chaos and the Butterfly Effect (1963) • Fuzzy Logic (1965) • Rubik's Cube (1974) • Fractals (1975) • The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (1996) • Tetris Is NP-Complete (2002) • Checkers Is Solved (2007) • Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (2007)

http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/math-book.html

I was determined to solve the rubiks cube puzzle on my own and did.

Shirleypal · Post by **Shirleypal** » 09-12-2009 11:18 AM

There are links to each one of these milestones if you want to read more.

joequinn · Post by **joequinn** » 09-12-2009 01:01 PM

I despised mathematics in my adolescence (indeed, I almost failed high school geometry), and then, in a fateful year of growth-within-death, I suddenly beheld, in a flash, the cold, inhuman, supremely serene beauty of mathematics. And that vision has remained intact within my mind for the past thirty-five years without diminishment...

Bertrand Russell said in his Autobiography that he was so miserable in his adolescence that he would have committed suicide --- were it not for his love of mathematics. In college I could not understand at all why Russell would care so much for such an irrelevant occupation of the mind. But now I know, oh yes, now I know...

Edna St. Vincent Millay gives us the last word on the vision that I first perceived in 1974:

Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.
Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,
And lay them prone upon the earth and cease
To ponder on themselves, the while they stare
At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere
In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese
Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release
From dusty bondage into luminous air.
O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,
When first the shaft into his vision shone
Of light anatomized! Euclid alone
Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they
Who, though once only and then but far away,
Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.

Either you understand this poem or you do not. If you do, no explication is necessary. If not, no explication is possible. And there it is...

Shirleypal · Post by **Shirleypal** » 09-12-2009 01:59 PM

It's a mathematical insight to a divine revelation Joe.

Shirleypal · Post by **Shirleypal** » 09-14-2009 08:44 PM

Did anyone catch Ian's show on this topic Saturday night.
Author and futurist Dr. Cliff Pickover will discuss how mathematics is the key to higher dimensions, aliens, infinity, parallel worlds, time travel, simulated realities, and Tunisian ant brains.

http://www.pickover.com/