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Mathematics students have cause to celebrate. A University of New South Wales academic, Dr Norman Wildberger, has rewritten the arcane rules of trigonometry and eliminated sines, cosines and tangents from the trigonometric toolkit. What's more, his simple new framework means calculations can be done without trigonometric tables or calculators, yet often with greater accuracy. Established by the ancient Greeks and Romans, trigonometry is used in surveying, navigation, engineering, construction and the sciences to calculate the relationships between the sides and vertices of triangles. "Generations of students have struggled with classical trigonometry because the framework is wrong," says Wildberger, whose book...

CELESTIAL AND MATHEMATICAL PRECISION IN ANCIENT ARCHITECTUREAnd we think we’re advanced MELISSA HIEBERT STAFF Many ancient ruins demonstrate that the people who constructed them had not only a special regard for celestial bodies and mathematics, but also a spot-on accuracy. From Egypt to Mexico, there is no doubt that past civilizations were involved in incredibly complex space calculations, mathematics and architectural endeavours. Although many historians and archaeologists debate exactly what these civilizations did intentionally and what they did by mere chance, here are a few examples of how ancient architecture was created with mathematics and the cosmos in mind. iza...

It all started with Elvis. In 2003, mathematician Tim Pennings of Hope College in Holland, Mich., revealed to the world that his Welsh corgi, Elvis, appears to be solving a calculus problem when finding the optimal path to fetch a ball. In this case, optimal path means minimizing travel time. When Elvis and Pennings go to the beach, they always play fetch. Standing at the water's edge, Pennings throws a tennis ball out into the waves, and Elvis eagerly retrieves it. When Pennings throws the ball at an angle to the shoreline, Elvis has several options. He can run along...

Two British researchers challenged the conventional history of mathematics in June when they reported having evidence that the infinite series, one of the core concepts of calculus, was first developed by Indian mathematicians in the 14th century. They also believe they can show how the advancement may have been passed along to Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who are credited with independently developing the concept some 250 years later... historian of mathematics George Gheverghese Joseph of the University of Manchester, who conducted the research with Dennis Almeida of the University of Exeter... says that no one has yet firmly...

A huge mysterious medieval book, penned by a Benedictine monk on animal skin with bizarre devilish illustration and incantation. But who has the missing pages, and why? Codex Gigas – literally translated means “Giant Book”, photograph below, with a box of matches resting on it, gives an idea of the scale of the almost metre long text, it takes two people to lift it, which makes it the largest medieval manuscript in the world. The book can be found in the National library in Stockholm – it has 600 pages – all made from animal (donkey) skin, the front and...

Do odd perfect numbers exist?...A massive thank you to Prof. Pace Nielsen for all his time and help with this video.A big thank you to Dr. Asaf Karagila, Pascal Ochem, Prof. Tianxin Cai, and Prof. William Dunham for their expertise and help. The Oldest Unsolved Problem in Math | 31:32Veritasium | 15.2M subscribers | 6,120,035 views | March 7, 2024

The civilization of Indus River Valley is considered one of the three earliest civilizations in world history, along with Mesopotamia and Egypt. Bigger geographically than those two as it unfolded starting in 3300 BCE across what is now Pakistan and India, the Indus civilization boasted uniform weights and measures, skilled artisans, a multifaceted system of trade and commerce, and upwards of 500 symbols and signs for communicating.But one question has vexed scholars for decades and hindered attempts to learn more about this civilization: Were those characters a language or more akin to pictograms? Even as some experts begin to translate...

That mean old clock on the wall doesn't tend to be particularly kind to leaders and entrepreneurs, so big surprise, companies that offer cliffs notes, abridged or otherwise easy-to-digest versions of books are soaring in popularity. These certainly aren't all bad, since they can help you quickly understand what the main point of a text is or let you jog your memory about it. They have their place. But if you're going to read a book, please just read the real, whole book already, at least most of the time. There are valuable reasons not to skip even one...

While exploring the area around the hotel that he had been evacuated to along the Dead Sea, Nati Toyikar came across an ancient coin dating back to the Hasmonean period.. An 11-year-old boy found a 2,000-year-old coin belonging to the Hasmonean king and high priest Alexander Yanai, Israel Antiquities Authority announced on Tuesday. Nati Toyikar was evacuated from his home, Kibbutz Magen, following Hamas's October 7 attacks. He is currently living in one of the hotels for evacuated residents along the Dead Sea, where, on one of his explorations, he unexpectedly found an ancient coin from the time of Hasmonean...

A teenage cook whose heroics onboard a warship helped shorten the Second World War has been honoured in his home town after a public vote. The regenerated centre of North Shields, North Tyneside, has been named after Thomas Brown, who was awarded the George Medal for helping to retrieve codebooks from a sinking German U-boat in October 1942. The books were later used to crack the Enigma code by experts at Bletchley Park, enabling the British to decipher Nazi messages. Two naval men died while searching the stricken submarine but Thomas, a 15-year-old civilian who lied about his age to...

On Friday night at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the conservative educational foundation ISI awarded Christopher Rufo with their 2024 Conservative Book of the Year Award for his America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. Rufo’s book is certainly deserving of the honor because it gives the reader a cogent history of the main players and mechanisms by which America’s left conquered almost all our institutions. More importantly, in its closing chapters, it outlines the weaknesses of the “Revolution of 1968” and outlines some ways by which those who favor the “Revolution of 1776” can fight...

Archaeologists have unearthed a 3,300-year-old clay tablet depicting a catastrophic foreign invasion of the Hittite Empire in Büklükale, about 100 km from Turkey’s capital Ankara. A translation of the tablet’s cuneiform text indicates that the invasion occurred during a Hittite civil war, presumably in an attempt to support one of the fighting factions. Previously, only broken clay tablets had been found in the excavations at Büklükale, but this one is in almost perfect condition. Based on the typology and distribution of the collected pottery shards, Büklükale is thought to be a single-period city belonging to the Hittite Empire Period and...

The discovery of a remarkable artifact from centuries ago among tens of thousands of medieval objects found in Sweden has thrilled archaeologists.Nearly 30,000 objects were discovered during the two-year excavation of medieval Kalmar, according to the Archaeologists, which is part of the government's National Historical Museums. Among the unique finds was a gold ring in almost new condition.Carved with the figure of Christ, the ring dates to the beginning of the 15th Century, according to the agency. Based on its size, researchers said it's possible that a woman may have worn the ring. Other rings like it have been discovered...

It’s a movie that hasn’t been seen in decades, missing for so long that many didn’t even know it existed. That is, until it turned up in Omaha, Nebraska. On a projector in a Kansas City home, Gary Huggins cues up a recent discovery. “I was relieved to find it wouldn’t explode!”, he said. Huggins soon refocused his attention from the technical to find something he definitely wasn’t expecting. “Wow, I think I’ve discovered this film that nobody’s seen in at least 50 years, if not 100,” Huggins said. Huggins, a filmmaker himself, picked up the film at an auction...

A rare coin from the time of the Bar Kochba revolt, bearing the name "Eleazer the Priest," has been discovered at the foot of a cliff in the Judean Desert by Israeli archaeologists.The coin bears a date, 132 C.E. – the first year of the Bar Kochba revolt. It apparently rolled out of a cave in the cliff face where Jewish rebels had holed up, hiding from the furious Romans during the rebellion, says Dr. Eitan Klein, deputy head of the Israel Antiquities Authority's anti-theft division, which is trying to beat the legions of looters to ancient treasures in the...

The idea that wisdom is found through exploration has long been with us. It is a cornerstone of many cultures and the driving force behind scientific inquiry. We venture forth into the undiscovered, leaving behind the familiar, and the distractions and temptations therein, as the early Christian desert fathers and mothers did in Egypt. One need not travel far to satisfy this impulse. Extremes of experience have long fueled enlightenment, as memoirs of exile, debauchery, and disaster promise to this day. Many of the adventurers had no choice, however. Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy while imprisoned, facing execution on...

A South African anthropologist has asked permission to open the graves of William Shakespeare and his family to determine, among other things, what killed the Bard and whether his poems and plays may have been composed under the influence of marijuana. But while Shakespeare's skeleton could reveal clues about his health and death, the question of the man's drug use depends on the presence of hair, fingernails or toenails in the grave, said Francis Thackeray, the director of the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, who floated the proposal to the Church of England. Thackeray...

I’ll bet that everyone who knew him has a favorite Alan Dundes story. Here’s a couple of mine. To understand both, you have to know that Dundes was larger than life in many ways, including physically. I somehow don’t want to apply the adjective “fat” to him, although, yes, he was. Some called him “a tank,” others, “a rhino.” He was so formal and so formidable that I resort to an old-fashioned word, “portly.”I only ever saw him in a charcoal gray suit, white shirt, and dark tie. And he knew everything about his field. Students would line up in...

Newly discovered notes from 15th-century Italy show that the decimal point is actually 150 years older than what historians previously believed. Decimal points may seem basic, but they’re incredibly helpful in math. They divide whole numbers into tenths, hundredths, and thousandths, which makes calculations a lot easier compared to using fractions. Some forms of decimals have been around since the 900s in Damascus and the 1200s in China, as reported by Live Science. A solid system of decimals didn’t become fully established until 1593. This happened when the German mathematician Christopher Clavius included decimals in astronomical work. However, recent studies...

In December 2023, a farmer unexpectedly found the graves while plowing his field in the village of Nova Varbovka. Because this region was a Roman province called Moesia in antiquity, archaeologists from the Veliko Tarnovo Regional Museum of History came to excavate the graves.Both graves were built of brick, with plaster lining the walls and a large slab of limestone covering them. The larger of the two was roughly 10 feet (3 meters) long and contained the remains of two adults — a man and a woman who were both around 45 to 60 years old at death — buried...