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1900 BCE
Plato's Philosophy of Mathematics
The Babylonians of the Old Empire created stone tablets that demonstrated their knowledge of how to compute the sides of right-angled triangles. (Note: The exact date is unknown. According to Alberto Martinez, the tablets were created between 1900 and 1600 BCE.) -
500 BCE
Plato's Philosophy of Mathematics
Pythagoras passed away. He was a religious cult leader that, over the next several thousand years, would be accredited numerous mathematical discoveries, healing miracles, and achievements in the sciences. He is commonly claimed to have proved the hypotenuse theorem, yet there is no proof that this exists, and very few references to his work exist shortly following his death. Wide acclaim predominantly exist several centuries after death. -
380 BCE
Plato's Philosophy of Mathematics
Plato wrote Meno, a dialogue that narrates a discussion between Socrates and Meno. Socrates brings up numerous topics, asking an 'expert' to explain their meaning, yet finding out that neither he nor the expert knows the true meaning of the term. Socrates and Meno arrive at the realization that they do not know what virtue means, but at least they now know that they do not know. -
360 BCE
Plato's Philosophy of Mathematics (Extended Entry)
Plato wrote Book 7 of The Republic, a passage commonly referred to as the Allegory of the Cave. In it, Plato makes extensive commentary on perspective, education, and his philosophy on mathematics. See the following link:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/19AzLJopLUKtiWpGEhvi_c2RmYIR-93ttuLKe65QBseo/edit?usp=sharing -
250 BCE
Plato's Philosophy of Mathematics
Euclid finished The Elements, a mathematical work that discusses the hypotenuse theorem and includes multiple proofs, one of which is depicted here. Euclid referenced several students of Plato in this work. An interesting note is the lack of references to Pythagoras, which is curious, as he had supposedly discovered and proved the hypotenuse theorem. -
Radical Puzzles
Professor of Mathematics at Glasgow University Robert Simson and peer William Frend rejected the use of negative numbers as roots of equations. -
Radical Puzzles
Caspar Wessel submits a paper to the Royal Academy of Denmark, outlining a method to represent "impossible" solutions as imaginary expressions. Wessel used this to "explain the paradox of why sometimes one needs recourse to the impossible to solve the possible." -
Radical Puzzles
A well-renowned Cambridge mathematician, Robert Woodhouse, submitted a paper to the Royal Society of London that supported solutions found via imaginary means. Woodhouse was trying to convince his fellow mathematicians to support this method as well in an attempt to preserve the prevalence of logic in mathematics. -
Radical Puzzles
Lazare Carnot publishes his book "Geometry of Position," a body of work that attempted to better redefine the meaning of magnitudes and positions of figures. -
Radical Puzzles (Extended Entry)
Mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss began to publish his own approach to the radical puzzle (-1)^(1/2), saying that this was equal to i, and that expressions of the form a+bi should be called 'complex numbers.' More information on Dr. Gauss' approach can be found at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DasPel_lUjxZKbc2w3ynOW_qjQJIX9BgUMmeCrjoeS4/edit?usp=sharing -
Radical Puzzles
Mathematician Augustus De Morgan argued that 'negative' merely meant an opposite direction rather than a concept of something less than nothing. He also argued that the concept of a quantity less than nothing was absurd, made no sense, and should be discarded. -
Impossible Chemistry
Marie Curie was born Maria Sklowdowska in Warsaw, Poland. She spent her childhood being educated by her parents until the death of her mother, ten years later. -
Impossible Chemistry
Maria moved to Paris to enroll in Sorbonne University and became known as Marie, a more French-sounding name. There, she would go on to further her education, eventually seeking to work in a laboratory. She ended up working in Pierre Curie's laboratory, who studied chemistry and magnetism at the time. -
Impossible Chemistry (Extended Entry)
Marie married former lab-mate Pierre Curie and began to study Uranium based off of the research of Wilhelm Roentgen's X-Rays and Henri Becquerel's discovery of rays emitted from Uranium. Curie used a device built by Pierre's brother, pictured here, to measure small electrical currents. For more information, see:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sEcNfBEP_i-QyV_s5KnazyWdoQr2aji9-K9SjYoLmGc/edit?usp=sharing -
Impossible Chemistry
Marie Curie, alongside Henri Becquerel and Pierre Curie, was awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics "in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena" discovered by Becquerel. -
Relativity
Albert Einstein published his famous "Annus Mirabilis," including a section on special relativity as well as extensive discussions on space, time, mass, and energy. The special relativity portion established inertial reference frames are constant, and the speed of light in a vacuum is a constant. -
Impossible Chemistry
Pierre Curie was run over by a horse cart and was killed instantly. Consequently, Sorbonne offered her Pierre's now vacant teaching position, and she took it in the hopes of one day creating a memorial laboratory for Pierre. -
Impossible Chemistry
Marie Curie was awarded the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element". -
Relativity (Extended Entry)
Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity. It covers topics such as gravitational attraction and warping. For more information, see:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WszaFj1zf1CpZTg8g-Uyp-2r9KMK7Nw7Af79z6A-wJA/edit?usp=sharing -
Relativity
Harvard researchers were able to observe gravitational redshift for the first time. Redshift is the process by which the frequency of electromagnetic radiation is reduced when it's observed in a region of higher gravitational potential than the origin location. -
Relativity
NASA published the results from their Gravity Probe B, originally launched in 2004. The probe contained devices used to measure the geodetic effect and frame-dragging. The geodetic effect is the warping of space and time around a gravity-inducing body, and frame-dragging is the pull of space and time induced by a rotating space body. The probe was successful in measuring both, confirming Einstein's hypothesis. -
Relativity
Researchers were able to successfully observe Einstein's predicted gravitational waves at LIGO. They were able to detect waves created by a black hole merger that produced a wavelengths in the realm of 10^-18 meters in a LIGO-sized detector.
