How a farm boy from Wales gave the world pi

One of the most important numbers in maths might today be named after the Greek letter π or "pi", but the convention of representing it this way actually doesn't come from Greece at all. It comes from the pen of an 18th ...

Hundreds of copies of Newton's Principia found in new census

In a story of lost and stolen books and scrupulous detective work across continents, a Caltech historian and his former student have unearthed previously uncounted copies of Isaac Newton's groundbreaking science book Philosophiae ...

Implications of no-free-lunch theorems

In the 18th century, the philosopher David Hume observed that induction—inferring the future based on what's happened in the past—can never be reliable. In 1997, SFI Professor David Wolpert with his colleague Bill Macready ...

The least sea ice in 800 years

New research, which reconstructs the extent of ice in the sea between Greenland and Svalbard from the 13th century to the present indicates that there has never been so little sea ice as there is now. The research results ...

Tales from the crypt: Mummies reveal TB's Roman lineage

Samples from mummies in a Hungarian crypt have revealed that multiple tuberculosis strains derived from a single Roman ancestor that circulated in 18th-century Europe, scientists said Tuesday.

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