Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat who is credited, alongside Sir Isaac Newton, with the creation of calculus in addition to many other branches of mathematics, such as binary arithmetic and statistics. Leibniz has been called the "last universal genius" due to his vast expertise across fields, which became a rarity after his lifetime with the coming of the Industrial Revolution and the spread of specialized labor. He is a prominent figure in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathematics. He wrote works on philosophy, theology, ethics, politics, law, history, philology, games, music, and other studies. Leibniz also made major contributions to physics and technology, and anticipated notions that surfaced much later in probability theory, biology, medicine, geology, psychology, linguistics and computer science.
Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, theories and theorems that are developed and proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many areas of mathematics, which include number theory, algebra, geometry, analysis, and set theory.
Hermann Günther Grassmann was a German polymath known in his day as a linguist and now also as a mathematician. He was also a physicist, general scholar, and publisher. His mathematical work was little noted until he was in his sixties. His work preceded and exceeded the concept which is now known as a vector space. He introduced the Grassmannian, the space which parameterizes all k-dimensional linear subspaces of an n-dimensional vector space V. In linguistics he helped free language history and structure from each other.
A binary code represents text, computer processor instructions, or any other data using a two-symbol system. The two-symbol system used is often "0" and "1" from the binary number system. The binary code assigns a pattern of binary digits, also known as bits, to each character, instruction, etc. For example, a binary string of eight bits can represent any of 256 possible values and can, therefore, represent a wide variety of different items.
A binary number is a number expressed in the base-2 numeral system or binary numeral system, a method for representing numbers that uses only two symbols for the natural numbers: typically "0" (zero) and "1" (one). A binary number may also refer to a rational number that has a finite representation in the binary numeral system, that is, the quotient of an integer by a power of two.
Thomas Harriot, also spelled Harriott, Hariot or Heriot, was an English astronomer, mathematician, ethnographer and translator to whom the theory of refraction is attributed. Thomas Harriot was also recognized for his contributions in navigational techniques, working closely with John White to create advanced maps for navigation. While Harriot worked extensively on numerous papers on the subjects of astronomy, mathematics and navigation, he remains obscure because he published little of it, namely only The Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588). This book includes descriptions of English settlements and financial issues in Virginia at the time. He is sometimes credited with the introduction of the potato to the British Isles. Harriot invented binary notation and arithmetic several decades before Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, but this remained unknown until the 1920s. He was also the first person to make a drawing of the Moon through a telescope, on 5 August 1609, about four months before Galileo Galilei.
Early modern philosophy The early modern era of philosophy was a progressive movement of Western thought, exploring through theories and discourse such topics as mind and matter, is a period in the history of philosophy that overlaps with the beginning of the period known as modern philosophy. It succeeded the medieval era of philosophy. Early modern philosophy is usually thought to have occurred between the 16th and 18th centuries, though some philosophers and historians may put this period slightly earlier. During this time, influential philosophers included Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant, all of whom contributed to the current understanding of philosophy.
A centered nonagonal number is a centered figurate number that represents a nonagon with a dot in the center and all other dots surrounding the center dot in successive nonagonal layers. The centered nonagonal number for n layers is given by the formula
Feynman's Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the Sun is a book based on a lecture by Richard Feynman. Restoration of the lecture notes and conversion into book form was undertaken by Caltech physicist David L. Goodstein and archivist Judith R. Goodstein.
Robin James Wilson is an English mathematician. He is an emeritus professor in the Department of Mathematics at the Open University, having previously been Head of the Pure Mathematics Department and Dean of the Faculty. He was a stipendiary lecturer at Pembroke College, Oxford and, from 2004 to 2008, Gresham Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, London. On occasion, he teaches at Colorado College in the United States. He is also a long standing fellow of Keble College, Oxford.
The problem in number theory known as "Fermat's Last Theorem" has repeatedly received attention in fiction and popular culture. It was proved by Andrew Wiles in 1994.
Dirk van Dalen is a Dutch mathematician and historian of science.
In physics and the philosophy of physics, quantum Bayesianism is a collection of related approaches to the interpretation of quantum mechanics, the most prominent of which is QBism. QBism is an interpretation that takes an agent's actions and experiences as the central concerns of the theory. QBism deals with common questions in the interpretation of quantum theory about the nature of wavefunction superposition, quantum measurement, and entanglement. According to QBism, many, but not all, aspects of the quantum formalism are subjective in nature. For example, in this interpretation, a quantum state is not an element of reality—instead, it represents the degrees of belief an agent has about the possible outcomes of measurements. For this reason, some philosophers of science have deemed QBism a form of anti-realism. The originators of the interpretation disagree with this characterization, proposing instead that the theory more properly aligns with a kind of realism they call "participatory realism", wherein reality consists of more than can be captured by any putative third-person account of it.
Abstract object theory (AOT) is a branch of metaphysics regarding abstract objects. Originally devised by metaphysician Edward Zalta in 1981, the theory was an expansion of mathematical Platonism.
Pollock's conjectures are closely related conjectures in additive number theory. They were first stated in 1850 by Sir Frederick Pollock, better known as a lawyer and politician, but also a contributor of papers on mathematics to the Royal Society. These conjectures are a partial extension of the Fermat polygonal number theorem to three-dimensional figurate numbers, also called polyhedral numbers.
Cathy Kessel is a U.S. researcher in mathematics education and consultant, past-president of Association for Women in Mathematics, winner of the Association for Women in Mathematics Louise Hay Award, and a blogger on Mathematics and Education. She served as an editor for Illustrative Mathematics from the end of 2015 through July 15, 2017.
Adolf Weiler (1851–1916) was a Swiss mathematician.
The Center for the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists (HWPS) is an interdisciplinary research center at the University of Paderborn, focused on the work of historical women philosophers and scientists. The Center is responsible for the publication of the Journal of the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists. The Center also awards the annual Elizabeth of Bohemia prize, Europe's first prize honoring women philosophers. The Center received a major grant from the Alexander von Humboldt foundation for the study of women philosophers in Ukraine, and also maintains a research network and talk series for researchers working on the history of women philosophers and scientists.
In differential geometry, the Tait–Kneser theorem states that, if a smooth plane curve has monotonic curvature, then the osculating circles of the curve are disjoint and nested within each other. The logarithmic spiral or the pictured Archimedean spiral provide examples of curves whose curvature is monotonic for the entire curve. This monotonicity cannot happen for a simple closed curve but for such curves the theorem can be applied to the arcs of the curves between its vertices.
Glenn A. Hartz is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the Ohio State University. He is known for his works on Leibniz's metaphysics and is the editor of The Leibniz Review.
