Resources

Mathematical Biographies

This is a comprehensive library of on-line biographies of mathematicians, brought to you by the School of Math and Statistics at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.

http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/BiogIndex.html

This is a truly remarkable resource. It looks as though they have thousands of mathematicians in the database, and you can search the biographies by author, region, area, or mathematical topic.

Each entry contains a bio, a list of publications, awards, pictures, and other related materials. You can also check out their famous curves index.

Bravo, SMSUSAS! This is the kind of thing that the internet was really made for.

Related Posts

Library of Curves

By patrick honner, 14 years8 years ago

Cool Knot Animations

This is a nice collection of some lovely mathematical images and animations:

http://www.math.ru.nl/knopen/

There are some knot animations, some 3-D fractals, and some cool surfaces. It seems as though these images and animations were generated in Maple.

There are also some nice images generated in some kind of ray-tracing program that may or may not be called vort.

Vort could also be the name of the person who created all these images. I’m not sure; my Dutch isn’t very good.

By patrick honner, 14 years8 years ago

2011 Top Careers and Math

This report from CareerCast ranks 200 jobs from best to worst:

http://www.careercast.com/jobs-rated/2011-ranking-200-jobs-best-worst

Jobs were analyzed based on five factors: Environment, Income, Outlook, Stress, and Physical Demands.

As is so often the case in these job-ranking surveys, math-based careers fared very well: coming in at #2 is Mathematician (whatever that means), #3 is Actuary (always near the top of these lists), and at #4 is Statistician (great if you like stats, I suppose).

I guess Roustabout is not as much fun as it sounds, as it placed 200th in the rankings. And I’ve met a lot of happy, successful Taxi Drivers (#192) in my life.

It’s not surprising to see Teacher in the #100 spot, with its high stress-to-income ratio. But Surgeon right behind at #101? According to the results, it’s about 3 times as stressful but about 7 times the pay.

Might be worthwhile to take a closer look at the methodology, which can be found here.

By patrick honner, 14 years8 years ago

Appreciation Resources

The Most Beautiful Equations

This is a nice comment-thread and poll on Quora responding to the question “What is the most beautiful equation?”

http://www.quora.com/Mathematics/What-is-the-most-beautiful-equation

No surprise to see Euler’s Identity on top with a whopping 350 votes.

There are fun entries all throughout thread, and I definitely learned a few things through perusing. And I guess I can forgive the participants for including some inequalities on the list.

By patrick honner, 14 years8 years ago

Appreciation Resources

Origami Buckyball

This is a cool video showing the assembly of an origami Buckyball.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb2lHNqPm7w

The Buckyball is a geometric form named after the architect, designer, and futurist Buckminster Fuller, who used the shape in his designs. It was later discovered that certain carbon molecules take the shape of buckyballs, and it was even recently confirmed that these molecules existed in deep space.

History Resources

Mathematical Biographies

Geometry Resources

Cool Knot Animations

Resources

2011 Top Careers and Math

Appreciation Resources

The Most Beautiful Equations

Appreciation Resources

Origami Buckyball

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