The Wonders of Logarithms
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The wonders of logarithms
What a strange character Napier was! Having passed away exactly four hundred years ago, this mathematician managed to transform multiplication into addition and raising to a power into multiplication. He invented logarithms for this purpose, which would enable immense scientific progress. It would later be understood that the logarithm maintains a reciprocity with the exponential function, thus allowing for a development of differential and integral calculus. Although nowadays logarithm tables have been relegated to the attic, logarithms remain a very useful tool, well beyond mathematics.
A walk in the land of numbers
It is always a pleasure, in Tangente, to rediscover numbers, faithful companions of the mathematician's journey. We find them everywhere indeed: they are at the base of our numbering systems, we wonder about the distribution of prime numbers, we marvel at their arithmetic properties, as with the Chinese remainder theorem...
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Maryam Mirzakhani
Maryam Mirzakhani's recognition in Seoul in 2014 was a landmark: for the first time, mathematics' most prestigious award went to a woman—an Iranian woman, no less. Can we explain her work on surfaces to our readers? This article attempts to rise to the challenge.
Jean-Pierre Kahane: A committed mathematician
Jean-Pierre Kahane, who passed away last June at the age of 90, left his mark on his era in many ways: through his work in analysis, which earned him international renown and election to the Académie des sciences; and through his commitment, both political and in the popularization of mathematics.
Goldberg Variations and Exercices de style:
Bach delighted in weaving combinatorial and geometric structures into his compositions. His famous Goldberg Variations are a masterpiece of the genre. Vincent Rouquès, a Paris-based choirmaster, drew on this richness by pairing them with Raymond Queneau's Exercices de style...
Literature and mathematics
Perec in the Pléiade, Nabokov in Big Data, and mathematics in a "digest"
Tangente Awards
The Tangente Awards were launched to celebrate creativity inspired by mathematics and its links with many other fields, including literature, computing and the arts. Run by the Club Tangente association, these initiatives invite our readers to take part or vote at this time each year.
Raymond Smullyan (1919–2017)
An eclectic mathematician, Raymond Smullyan, who died last June, was best known to the general public for his books of mathematical recreations centered on logic.
Holiday geometry
The holidays are also a chance to uncover the mathematics all around us
Poets talk to us about math… and vice versa
Mathematics and poetry are two ways of making sense of the world. Worlds apart? Not quite.
Mathematical calligrams
A calligram is a poem arranged on the page to form an image, usually related to its subject. Here we present several quotations about mathematics in the form of calligrams.