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There is one topic in calculus (that has led me to research and discuss our next mathematician today) that often separates students into ordinary and extraordinary: the differentiation and integration of polar curves. The transition to polar coordinates from the Cartesian plane feels weird to an unnatural extent. The traditional x and y axes are…
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Have you ever heard of a problem so absurd that a 5th grader can understand it, but not even the finest mathematical minds in the world can solve it? Introducing the Collatz Conjecture. The Collatz conjecture is a famous problem in mathematics proposed by German mathematician Lothar Collatz in 1937. Collatz was a student at…
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Today is the one-year anniversary of Beautiful Minds of Math! As I progress into a second year of writing posts on this blog, I wanted to cover and celebrate an influential yet humble mathematician who inspired many to explore math: Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian mathematician and the first woman to receive the Fields Medal in…
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Welcome back to Beautiful Minds of Math, everyone! Today’s entry will focus on Thomas Bayes. Your inbox dodges spam, and recommendation engines guess your next favorite song, all thanks to one elegant update rule from a soft-spoken thinker named Thomas Bayes. Let’s meet the mathematician and his theorem that teaches numbers to change their minds.…
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When I sit down to study for math (especially calculus), I feel like I am drowning in so many different types of formulas and rules. However, I hadn’t yet realized how many different contributions to math came from just one person: Leonhard Euler. Euler (pronounced oil-er!) reshaped the way mathematics is studied and applied. Born…
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This summer, in my preparation for AP Calculus BC, I came across a concept in unit 6 on the area under a curve known as Riemann Sums. The idea that this area could be approximated with two sets of seemingly random rectangles was surprising to me, for I was very familiar with derivatives at this…
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Magnus Carlsen once jested in an interview that John Nunn “never became world champion because he is too clever… his enormous powers of understanding distracted him from chess.” The throwaway line was meant as a light compliment. Nevertheless, it hinted at the type of intellectual being that Nunn was, which gave him the ability to…
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If you have ever watched “The Man Who Knew Infinity”, you have subconsciously studied the genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan. Being a self-taught mathematician in colonial India during the early 1900s was hardly the kind of career choice parents bragged about at the temple. Jobs were scarce, resources scarcer, and formal training scarcer still. Yet Srinivasa Ramanujan…
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Being a mathematician in the 1900s was not an occupation that many people envied. Mathematicians often didn’t have much money, and by this point in history, it seemed like there was nothing new under the sun in terms of ideas or concepts to explore in the field. John Von Neumann, a Hungarian-American mathematician, was not…
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After recently pondering the elegant subtleties of zero, the notion that “the existence of nothing is required to define something”, I was reminded of one of the most pivotal figures in mathematical history: Brahmagupta, the 7th-century Indian mathematician who revolutionized math by fully developing zero as a number. While many have heard that “Arab mathematicians…
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Beautiful Minds 