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The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann
By the time of his death in 1957 at the modest age of 53, the Hungarian polymath had not only revolutionized several subfields of mathematics and…
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Jørgen Veisdal
The Eccentricities of J. Robert Oppenheimer
As a child he collected rocks, wrote poetry and studied French literature. Never weighing more than 130 pounds, throughout his life he was a “tall and…
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Jørgen Veisdal
2
The Martians of Budapest
The Martians of Budapest”, sometimes referred to as simply “The Martians” is a colloquial term used to describe a group of prominent Hungarian…
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Jørgen Veisdal
The Golden Age of Quantum Physics (1927)
The “most intelligent photograph ever taken”, as it is sometimes known, was captured during the Fifth Solvay International Conference on Electrons and…
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Jørgen Veisdal
The Anarchist Abstractionist — Who was Alexander Grothendieck?
Mathematician Alexander Grothendieck was born in 1928 to anarchist parents who left him to spend the majority of his formative years with foster…
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Jørgen Veisdal
2
The Battle Line at Louvain (1914)
“Where they burn books, they will also burn people” — Heinrich Heine
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Jørgen Veisdal
6
Abel: The Mozart of Mathematics
“Although Abel shared with many mathematicians a complete lack of musical talent, I will not sound absurd if I compare his kind of productivity and his…
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Jørgen Veisdal
Kurt Gödel's Brilliant Madness
Hungarian polymath John von Neumann (1903–1957) once wrote that Kurt Gödel was “absolutely irreplaceable” and “in a class by himself”. Describing his…
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Jørgen Veisdal
When Wiener met Einstein (1925)
This issue narrates Norbert Wiener’s chance encounter with Albert Einstein in his own words as recounted to his sister Bertha in 1925. At the time of…
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Jørgen Veisdal
1
Gödel's Solution to Einstein's Field Equations (1949)
Following Kurt Gödel (1906-1978)’s publications on the first- and second incompleteness theorems (1931) and later work on Cantor’s continuum hypothesis…
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Jørgen Veisdal
The Poincaré Conjecture (1904)
Poincaré began working on what is now considered to be the foundation of topology and algebraic topology in the 1890s with the work Analysis Situs…
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Jørgen Veisdal
1
Oppenheimer’s Letter of Recommendation for Richard Feynman (1943)
Let’s journey back to November 1943. The Manhattan project is in its fourth year of operations, and J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Los Alamos Laboratory is…
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Jørgen Veisdal
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