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332 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2016
[…] mathematics […] is the science of abstraction par excellence. The objects that mathematics studies do not have a physical existence. They are not material, they are not made of atoms, they’re purely ideas. And yet these ideas are remarkably effective when it comes to making sense of the world.
Euclid’s work is today the second-most published text in history, just behind the Bible.
In 2009, the ‘π Day’ was officially recognized by the United States House of Representatives. This year, the aficionados of π awaited their day with even greater impatience. Today’s date is 3/14/15, and an extra two figures add to the coincidence of the date and the constant.
Bhāskara I, who was the first to write the zero in the form of a circle and to employ the decimal system that we still use today in a scientific way. Indeed, our ten figures, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, which we usually refer to as Arabic figures, are in reality Indian.
Global Positioning System (GPS). At every instant, their paths are determined by their positioning relative to four satellites that track them from space. The solution of the resulting equations again calls upon trigonometry. Do the drivers of these cars know that the voice that calmly orders them to turn left has just that very instant used a few sines or cosines?
The Paris Meridian acted as a reference until the International Meridian Conference in Washington, DC in 1884. It was then replaced by the Greenwich Meridian, which passes through the Royal Observatory in London. In exchange for the Meridian, the British committed themselves to adopting the metric system. Matter on hold.
You just had to enter your calculation on the punched card and the machine would take care of everything. This revolutionary form of operation made Babbage’s machine the very first computer in history
[Ada Lovelace] described a complicated code capable of calculating the Bernoulli sequence (which was discovered a century earlier by the Swiss Jacob Bernoulli and is extremely useful in infinitesimal calculus). This code is generally considered to be the very first computer program, and makes Lovelace the first programmer in history.