Whether for doing mental arithmetic or impressing the crowd, certain numerical values need to be learned by heart. The digits of π are an important example, but a particularly tricky one to memorize, since they follow no simple pattern. To overcome the difficulty, nothing beats alexandrine verse.
NewListen to the articleon Tangente Audio19:58Open in Tangente Audio
Articles recommended for you.
Martin Gardner left behind, in literature and literary criticism, a rich, profoundly original body of work that, unfortunately, remains little known in its entirety. This article offers an overview.
They contain no data, yet a little ingenuity and plenty of common sense are all you need to work them out in your head: welcome to the world of the wacky problems invented by physicist Enrico Fermi.
While the allegorical representation of mathematics is always done through female figures, medieval reality allowed only a very few women to engage in it: a handful of nuns and high-ranking women, such as a Florentine widow who took over her husband's abacus school in 1330.
Mathematical recreations feature prominently in the Arab-Islamic tradition, yet they do not appear to have been collected in dedicated anthologies. Some examples, very well known in Europe, pose a real challenge to historians seeking to trace how they circulated.
Discussion
Sign in to post a comment and talk with other readers.
No comments yet. Be the first to respond.
