Chapters: Ch 1 · Ch 2 · Ch 3 · Ch 4 · Ch 5
History of Science & Mathematicians
The Computer Scientist Who Can’t Stop Telling Stories — Donald Knuth (Quanta) A profile of Donald Knuth — the author of The Art of Computer Programming and creator of TeX — who at 82 continues to pursue a vision of computer science as literary art: programs as objects of beauty, algorithms as stories, and code as a form of human expression. The article captures Knuth’s uniquely integrative view of computing, mathematics, and writing. https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientist-donald-knuth-cant-stop-telling-stories-20200416/
Claude Shannon Biography Notes (personal, Jun 2, 2024) Personal notes on Shannon’s life and character: no hierarchy, infinitely curious, lazy to publish, extraordinary ability to abstract engineering problems into mathematics. Shannon rode unicycles (including off-center ones and penny farthings), juggled, wrote about the mathematics of juggling, and wanted his funeral cortège to consist of six unicyclists carrying his coffin. His gravestone bears the law of entropy. With Ed Thorpe, he built the first wearable computer to beat roulette at casinos. His engineering projects included a bouncing juggling clown, a mouse to solve a maze (before transistors existed), a chess robot for endgames, and a Rubik’s cube solver. He lasted 42 moves against the world’s No. 1 chess player and died of Alzheimer’s, having taken up daily running in middle age.
Claude Shannon’s Timeline — Trung Phan Tweet A visual timeline of Shannon’s life and achievements shared by writer Trung Phan, providing a chronological overview from his early work in switching theory (his MIT master’s thesis, often called “the most important master’s thesis of the 20th century”) through his 1948 A Mathematical Theory of Communication to his late eccentricities at Bell Labs.
‘He Was in Mystic Delirium’: Alexander Grothendieck — The Guardian A long-form Guardian feature on Alexander Grothendieck — the most visionary mathematician of the 20th century — who revolutionized algebraic geometry by introducing schemes, toposes, and étale cohomology before withdrawing entirely from mathematics at age 42, eventually living as a hermit in the Pyrenees. The piece notes that Huawei has been studying Grothendieck’s unpublished metaphysical writings for potential AI applications, a claim greeted with appropriate scepticism by most mathematicians. https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/aug/31/alexander-grothendieck-huawei-ai-artificial-intelligence
Poincaré Three-Body Problem — Stable Solutions Exist Despite No Uniform First Integral A note on the paradox at the heart of classical mechanics: Poincaré proved in 1890 that no analytic first integral exists for the general three-body problem, meaning it is not integrable in the classical sense. Yet empirically stable configurations exist — the Trojan asteroids at Jupiter’s Lagrange points, the Moon’s orbit — explained by KAM theory (Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser) showing that quasi-periodic orbits can persist on tori in phase space even amid chaos.
Inside arXiv wired.com — https://www.wired.com/story/inside-arxiv-most-transformative-code-science/
A Wired profile of arXiv, the preprint server that has transformed scientific communication — covering its history, the Cornell Library, Paul Ginsparg’s founding vision, and how open preprints reshaped physics, mathematics, and now AI research. [→ mathematics-science; academic publishing]