“Much as it took Lucas to revolutionize the search for Mersennes primes and Lord Kelvin to introduce new ways to look for space-filling-shapes, I think we're still waiting for the key mathematical techniques needed to fully understand knots. I suspect… — Matt Parker Copy Share
“This quest to take a problem and see what happens in different situations is called generalizing, and it is this force that drives mathematics forward. Mathematicians constantly want to find solutions and patterns which apply to as many situations as… — Matt Parker Copy Share Image
“Along with working on the Basel problem, Euler realized that adding an infinite sequence of reciprocal powers for all whole numbers will give you the same answer as multiplying together an infinite sequence of fractions which use only the prime numbers. So the zeta function can be written as two different equations, one of which relies only on the prime… — Matt Parker Copy Share
“I was believing your kind were all dead!' Warvitch bellowed at the minotaur, over the sithkall's choking death growls. 'It will be a great… — Matt Parker Copy Share Image
“Despite their ubiquity on the number line, transcendentals are surprisingly hard to pin down. It took until 1873 to prove that e was transcendental, making it the first number we knew for definite was. The poster-child of maths, pi, didn't join the transcendental fold until 1882. Even today, we know that at least one of e + pi and e… — Matt Parker Copy Share
“The proof in 1882 that pi is a transcendental number put a 2,000 year old problem to rest: for any given circle, can you draw a square of the same surface area using a compass and a straight edge? Since 1882, we know that no, you can't. To draw a square the area of a circle you need to be… — Matt Parker Copy Share
“The compact disc may now be outdated technology, but a lot of music albums are still released on CD. A standard 700-megabyte CD is actually 703.125 megabytes (a rare case of the music industry giving something extra away for free), which is a total of 5,898,240,000 1s and 0s. By my calculations, the number of possible different CDs in base-10… — Matt Parker Copy Share
“The zeta function is the sum of an infinite sequence of inverse powers.” — Matt Parker Copy Share Image
“At a very rough estimate, the domino computer we built took six hours to set up and run, which means it could do four… — Matt Parker Copy Share Image
“In our current number system, if you multiply 111,111,111 by itself, you get the rather pleasing 12,345,678,987,654,321 (all the digits count up from 1… — Matt Parker Copy Share Image
“Much as it took Lucas to revolutionize the search for Mersennes primes and Lord Kelvin to introduce new ways to look for space-filling-shapes, I think we're still waiting for the key mathematical techniques needed to fully understand knots. I suspect a new generation of mathematicians will have to go to university and become knot theorists on order to give us… — Matt Parker Copy Share
“For DNA to reproduce, it needs to unzip itself down the middle, and the topology of the dna chain dictates which knots are formed… — Matt Parker Copy Share Image
“To this day, the Clay Mathematics Institute's bounty of $1 million for anyone who can prove that all the non-trivial zeroes of the zeta… — Matt Parker Copy Share Image
“The Riemann Hypothesis states that all the non-trivial zeroes of the zeta function are on this line. If we can prove the Riemann Hypothesis… — Matt Parker Copy Share Image
