The Center of Math Blog

In a couple of weeks the Center of Math will be attending the J oint Mathematics Meeting (JMM) in Seattle. The American Mathematical Socie...

Thales of Miletus was an ancient Greek mathematician, scientist, and philosopher who predated  most well known Greek thinkers. Though his c...

This Saturday marks the first SAT exam of the year, so to celebrate, the  Center of Math is going to talk about the history of the SAT for...

Happy Oktoberfest! With the annual festival  taking place right now in Germany, the Center of Math wanted to celebrate by talking about thre...

With the first ACT exam quickly approaching--this Saturday, in fact!--the Center of Math wanted to talk about the history of the ACT and ho...

For this week Throwback Fact we decided to investigate the origins of the equals symbol. You may be surprised, the equals symbols hasn...

An example of a modern  Mancala board from Europe Source:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bao_europe.jpg         Many historians be...

Portrait of Ada Lovelace image: commons.wikimedia.org Ada Lovelace was born in London, England in 1815 to a poet father and math-lovin...

George Stokes (1819 - 1903) The University of Cambridge, founded in 1209, has produced many of the greatest scientific minds of all time...

Sally Ride in space. image: commons.wikimedia.org On this day in 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space (Valentina Te...

A WWII-era German Tank image: commons.wikimedia.org Last Saturday, June 6th, marked the 71st anniversary of D-Day, when the Allies invad...

Emmy Noether The way we name proofs in mathematics, most often after their founder, immortalizes mathematicians who could otherwise slip...

image: www.flickr.com In 1939, mathematician Richard von Mises proposed a problem. The answer was so counter-intuitive to many people, i...

We've mentioned pi  quite a few times on the blog (our pi  day post in particular). However, we've never discussed the reasoning...

A digital representaion of a Julia set quaternion In 1843, Irish mathematician Sir William Hamilton was walking across Dublin's Brou...

Tori's handwriting demonstrates a few properties of the first two perfect numbers We've mentioned the cult of Pythagoras and his...

After doing a little research, I’ve discovered that Cinco de Mayo is a holiday celebrated possibly more in the United States than i...

Carl Friedrich Gauss On this day in 1777, Carl Friedrich Gauss was born. The Prince of Mathematics was an important part of our Math Mad...

An image from our Instagram, when the Center attended JMM (by the AMS) in January Friday, April 24th (misaligned slightly from our Thro...

Da Vinci self portrait Choosing just one topic for a throwback was difficult this week. On this day in 1705, Isaac Newton was knighted b...