HackingTheUniverse

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Francoise Arago was born in 1786 in France and was an astronomer, physicist and mathematician. Some of his work complemented similar work by Faraday and Fresnel. His confirmation of a bright spot of light at the center of a circular shadow helped confirm Fresnel’s wave theory of light and is now known as [...]

Jean Babtiste Joseph Fourier (known as Joseph) was born in 1768 in France and was a mathematician who became known for his work on heat transfer and the analysis of periodic functions (wave forms) using combinations of trigonometric series. These are now called Fourier series and the process is called Fourier analysis.
PRECURSOR:
1642 - Newton
1700 - [...]

Yang Hui was born in Zhejiang province in China in 1238 during the Song Dynasty and was a mathematician who was associated with a triangular array of numbers very similar to Pascals triangle. Just as Pascal did not invent the triangle, Yang Hui seems to have inherited the knowledge of the numbers from Jia [...]

Voyager1 is currently the most distant human made object from the Earth, somewhere beyond 10 billion miles from the Sun. When we launched Voyager1 in 1977, a “golden record” was included with it, in the hopes that it would be able to communicate something about life on Earth to any intelligent beings that found [...]

Blaise Pascal was born in 1623 in Clermont, France. He is mostly known as being an outstanding mathematician, but also was a physicist and philosopher. He made significant contributions to the areas of conic sections and projective geometry. Pascal’s triangle is a number matrix in the shape of a triangle with the numbers staggered [...]

Born near Hamburg, Germany in 1885, Hermann Weyl was a mathematician whose work had a strong influence on both physics and number theory. He worked on combining general relativity and the laws of electromagnetism. He worked with Lie algebras, symmetry and created the first version of gauge theory which attempted to describe both electromagnetic and [...]

Omar Khayyam was born in Persia in 1048 and was a mathematician, astronomer and poet. He was known for using a geometric approach to analyzing algebra problems and for solving cubic equations using line segments. He noted that solving the cubic required the use of conic sections and could not be solved simply [...]

Born in Damascus, Syria in 1521, Taqi al-Din was an all around scientist, exelling at astronomy, mathematics, physics, medicine, botany, and a wide variety of engineering applications. He was also a judge and religious philospher. He described a steam turbine engine in a book called, “The Sublime Methods of Spiritual Machines” in 1551.
He invented [...]

pi or π is a constant but irrational number that represents the ratio between the area of any circle and the square of its radius. This gives us the famous formula: area = π x r2, which can be approximated by 22/7 or 3.14159. pi can also be expressed by dividing the circumference [...]

“Mathematics is the queen of sciences and number theory the queen of mathematics. She often condescends to render service to astronomy and other natural sciences, but in all relations she is entitled to the first rank.”

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss was born in Braunschweig, Germany in 1777. He made great contributions to mathematics, but was also [...]