BERTRAND HAUCHECORNE
179 articles published in Tangente
Math for everyoneN°194May 19, 2020An equation with too many unknowns
The Covid-19 pandemic took the world by surprise, both through its virulence and the speed of its spread. A wealth of statistics, sometimes contradictory, has been published. Governments have introduced measures that often differ from one country to another. A range of medical treatments is being used. Can mathematics help us make the right decisions?
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Math for everyoneN°194May 19, 2020The "9-3": a Covid hotspot or bad math?
A figure published by the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (Insee) and picked up by the media painted a catastrophic picture of public health in Seine-Saint-Denis (93).
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Math for everyoneN°74Apr 16, 2020Deflecting an asteroid?
An international team is tasked with studying the possibility of deflecting the trajectories of asteroids if there is a risk of collision with Earth.
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Math for everyoneN°74Apr 16, 2020Improving the 200 m record with maths!
What if speed records could be improved by changing the shape of athletics tracks?
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History and CultureN°193Mar 23, 2020The emergence of probability theory
In the second half of the 17th century, Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat exchanged letters on the development of a mathematical theory of probability that went beyond the elementary observations one might make about rolling a die. Christian Huygens would take their ideas further.
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History and CultureN°193Mar 19, 2020Translating concepts: yes, but how?
The names of new concepts and abbreviations often take very different paths as they pass from one language to another, enriching mathematical writing.
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Math for everyoneN°193Mar 19, 2020Adelard of Bath
Adelard of Bath was one of the translators of Euclid into Latin. He also translated many other mathematical texts from Arabic
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Math for everyoneN°193Mar 19, 2020From Baghdad to Toledo: legendary places
A great many works from ancient Greece survived and reached a wider audience thanks to their translation into Arabic or Latin. This legacy was made possible by the determination of a handful of rulers who understood the universality of knowledge and the importance of passing it on.
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Math for everyoneN°192Jan 22, 2020Disputes and paradoxes
Even the greatest mathematicians have fallen into the traps laid by logic and its paradoxes.
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Math for everyoneN°192Jan 22, 2020The paradoxes that shook mathematics
What a devilish theory Georg Cantor created with set theory! So thought some mathematicians at the turn of the 20th century, when a series of paradoxes seemed to threaten the foundations of mathematics. This prompted a reassessment of the role of logic.
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Math for everyoneN°192Jan 22, 2020Discontinuities and series of functions
The introduction of series of functions, followed by theorems establishing when continuity or differentiability is preserved in the limit, made it possible to construct objects with unusual, counterintuitive properties. Some famous mathematicians had tremendous fun with them!
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Math for everyoneN°192Jan 21, 2020The emergence of discontinuous functions
Until the early 19th century, everything seemed continuous. Trigonometric series brought discontinuous functions onto the scene. They prompted Riemann to generalize the notion of the integral, led Weierstrass to clarify the notion of continuity, and spurred Darboux to study derivatives.
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