Kurt Godel said, “Either mathematics is too big for the human mind or the human mind is more than a machine.”  I think he was right on both counts. Godel was an Austrian-born logician and mathematician whose work primarily in...

Abraham Lincoln read it more than any other book, except the Bible.  Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote a poem about its pure and simple beauty.  “So, what has that to do with mathematics?” you might ask.  The book is Euclid’s...

A scientist, astronomer, and mathematician, Galileo was one of the great minds of the Renaissance.  He also has a complicated history with the church that arose out of his defense of Copernican heliocentrism—the view that the sun, not the earth,...

History often tempts us to view people one-dimensionally: Hero or villain. And while a person’s legacy may ultimately be one or the other, the story usually is not so simplistic. Often good gives way to bad; honor gives way to...

Yesterday we learned that Plutarch wrote biographies of the men of Greece and Rome.  Historians throughout time have written grand histories—of World War II, of ancient Rome; of George Washington, and Cincinnatus; of lost civilizations, of kings, and popes and...

Plutarch said that “The world of man is best captured through the lives of the men who created history.”  He was a Greek historian who lived around 2,000 years ago, and is most famous for his work Parallel Lives, which is...

Vladimir Lenin was the founder of communist Russia and the Soviet Union.  He used lies about history to justify the evils of communism, and even once declared that “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.”  Lenin and his government...

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. day—a day on which we remember Dr. King for the important role that he played in American history and, in particular, in holding our nation to its founding principle, as written in the Declaration...

You have probably heard of Albert Einstein.  You may even recognize him in a picture – crazy white hair, big bushy mustache.  Like many of the scientists we’ve discussed this week, he was genius whose contributions to human knowledge—particularly in...

Sir Isaac Newton was a mathematician, physicist, and astronomer in the sixteen and seventeen hundreds.  His contributions in multiple fields of science (as well as mathematics) are astounding.  To this day, we study how objects move using Newton’s laws of...