Author Archives: admin

Book of the month: Étienne Ghys, La petite histoire des flocons de neige.

Posted on May 17, 2021 by admin

Seen up close, a snowflake reveals all sorts of splendors: a marvel of geometry and symmetry. In 1610, the great astronomer Johannes Kepler was astonished and wanted to explain why snowflakes have six branches. Etienne Ghys has in turn become … Continue reading →

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Klein Concert

Posted on December 2, 2019 by admin

Maria Mannone from the University of Palermo is a theoretical physicist and a musician (composer and conductor). Her field of interest is mathematical music theory. She and her students have created music based on the Klein bottle. In May 2019 … Continue reading →

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Site of the Month: 3Blue1Brown

Posted on September 30, 2019 by admin

3Blue1Brown presents animated videos about mathematics. It was created by Grant Sanderson, a graduate student from Stanford University who worked for Khan Academy. He created a YouTube-channel with videos on calculus, linear algebra, geometry, topology,  and many special topics such as … Continue reading →

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Developing Research in Mathematics Education

Posted on August 11, 2019 by admin

August’s book of the month is Developing Research in Mathematics Education: Twenty Years of Communication, Cooperation and Collaboration in Europe, edited by Tommy Dreyfus, Michèle Artigue, Despina Potari, Susanne Prediger, and Kenneth Ruthven. It is the first book in the … Continue reading →

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How Google works: Markov chains and eigenvalues

Posted on May 30, 2015 by admin

Originating author is Christiane Rousseau. From its very beginning, Google became “the” search engine. This comes from the supremacy of its ranking algorithm: the PageRank algorithm. Indeed, with the enormous quantity of pages on the World-Wide-Web, many searches end up … Continue reading →

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Dimension

Posted on May 29, 2015 by admin

Originating author is Christiane Rousseau. How do we measure the size of a geometric object? For subsets of the plane we often use perimeter, length, area, diameter, etc. These are not sufficient to describe fractals. The fractal objects are very … Continue reading →

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Fair voting: the quest for gold

Posted on May 28, 2015 by admin

Originating authors are Gabriel Rosenberg and Mark Iwen. It is a little known fact that two gold medals were awarded for the same pairs figure skating competition in the 2002 Winter Olympics. These two medals were ultimately a result of … Continue reading →

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Banach’s microscope to find a fixed point

Posted on May 27, 2015 by admin

Originating author is Christiane Rousseau. In this vignette, we will show how we start from a small game to discover one of the most powerful theorems of mathematics, namely the Banach fixed point theorem. This theorem has fantastic applications inside … Continue reading →

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A tale of two triangles: Heron triangles and elliptic curves

Posted on September 5, 2012 by admin

Originating author is William Mc Callum. If two triangles have the same area and the same perimeter, are they necessarily congruent? It turns out that the answer is no. For example, the triangle with sides and has the same area … Continue reading →

Posted in Mathematics Within the Last 100 Years | 5 Comments