philosophy
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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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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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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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After noticing on the calendar that it is March–Women’s History Month and seeing an old factorization method in my notes, I decided it was time to write about one of the most influential women in the world of mathematics. Despite the objectively greater prominence of men in terms of mathematical contributions, I want to highlight
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René Descartes is one of history’s most transformative thinkers, widely hailed as the “Father of Modern Philosophy” for his pioneering contributions to rationalism. Descartes was born in La Haye en Touraine, France, where he received a Jesuit education that nurtured his inquisitive mind and led him to challenge convention in everything from theology to physics
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Math has long been a foundational subject that has seen contributions from people from many different walks of life. Throughout the millennia of mathematical development, many of the most famous legacies come from ancient times, including innovations before the common era. However, there have been many notable mathematicians who, because of their brilliance, cannot simply
Beautiful Minds 