The Calculus Diaries - Jennifer Ouellette [117]
traffic flow
tulips
Twain, Mark
28 Days Later
2001: A Space Odyssey
vampires
vector calculus
vectors
food choices and
in disease spread
velocity, see speed
Verhulst, Pierre
Virgil
virtual worlds
Vitruvius
vomit comet
Wansink, Brian
Watanabe, Terrance
water waves
Watkins, Bill
watts
wavelength
waves
amplitude of
cosine, see cosines
Fourier transform and
frequency of
sine
sound
water
weight loss
devices for
diet pills for
diets for
Harris-Benedict equation and
Wheatstone, Charles
Whelan, Jim
Whitehead, Henry
William the Conqueror
Witch of Agnesi
work
World of Warcraft
worms
Yersin, Alexandre
Zander, Gustav
Zeno
Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (Seife)
Zombieland
zombies
Cordyceps fungi and
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Smith?’s model of
Zonaras, John
1
This account is given by Valerius Maximus, in Memorable Doings and Sayings. Historians differ as to how the soldier slew Archimedes, but a medieval woodcut depicts his head being cleft in two. Several accounts report that Marcellus was much distressed by the mathematician’s death, since he had great respect for the man’s ingenuity—even though that ingenuity had delayed his conquering of Syracuse.
2
Sophie Germain is best known for inventing the “Germain primes.” If you double a Germain prime number and add 1, you get another prime number. For example, double the prime number 2 is 4, plus 1 is 5—which is also a prime number.
3
To give you an idea of the depth of my ignorance at the outset, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Calculus proved to be a bit over my head. Perhaps it should be retitled The Half-Wit’s Guide to Calculus.
4
Spinach turned out to be the key to unlocking the mystery. Uwe Bergmann, a Stanford physicist at the Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory, heard about the Archimedes palimpsest at a conference in Germany and realized his method for studying photosynthesis in spinach could also be applied to the parchment, without damaging the manuscript. Spinach contains iron; and the ink used on the palimpsest also contained iron, so the same technique could be used.
5
Abraham Lincoln kept a copy of Euclid in his saddlebag, and studied it late at night by lamplight. “You never can make a lawyer if you do not understand what demonstrate means; and I left my situation in Springfield, went home to my father’s house, and stayed there till I could give any proposition in the six books of Euclid at sight,” he later wrote.
6
From an account by John Zonaras, who wrote in the twelfth century A.D.: “At last in an incredible manner he burned up the whole Roman fleet. For by tilting a kind of mirror toward the sun he concentrated the sun’s beam upon it; and owing to the thickness and smoothness of the mirror he ignited the air from this beam and kindled a great flame, the whole of which he directed upon the ships that lay at anchor in the path of the fire, until he consumed them all.”
7
A Welsh mathematician named Robert Recorde is credited with inventing the equal sign. He used it first in his 1557 treatise The Whetstone of Witte, which introduced algebra to England.
8
The acceleration is constant once the apple starts falling.
9
Another of Zeno’s paradoxes involved Achilles in a footrace with a tortoise. Since Achilles is so much faster, the tortoise gets a head start. Each time Achilles closes the distance by half, the tortoise also moves a bit more ahead. The distance between them gets smaller and smaller, but Achilles can never catch up, since the progression goes on forever. Except in real life, it doesn’t, and he can pass the tortoise quite easily.
10
My former college English professor, Janet, says that her epiphany on the limit came during a lecture on Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, using the number .111 . . .—which is equivalent to 1/9, the point where Achilles catches up with the tortoise (i.e., the limit). Janet didn’t take the matter on faith. The woman is a rigorous scholar, so she did all those painstaking calculations herself, adding everything up to find