A Kickstarter project for a children's math and science-oriented detective story: "This is the made up story about two very real girls - Ada, the world's first computer programmer, and Mary, the world's first science fiction author - caught up in a steampunk world of hot-air balloons and steam engines, jewel thieves and mechanical contraptions. For readers 8-12.
"This is a pro-math, pro-science, pro-history and pro-literature adventure novel for and about girls, who use their education to solve problems and catch a jewel thief. Ada and Mary encounter real historical characters, such as Percy Shelley, Charles Babbage, Michael Faraday, and Charles Dickens - people whom the girls actually knew. If Jane Austen wrote about zeppelins and brass goggles, this would be the book."
s a software tool for detecting equations and hidden mathematical relationships in your data. Its primary goal is to identify the simplest mathematical formulas which could describe the underlying mechanisms that produced the data. Eureqa is free to download and use.
"This book is designed to provide mathematics undergraduates with some historical background to the material that is now taught universally to students in their final years at school and the first years at college or university: the core subjects of calculus, analysis, and abstract algebra, along with others such as mechanics, probability, and number theory. All of these evolved into their present form in a relatively limited area of western Europe from the mid sixteenth century onwards, and it is there that we find the major writings that relate in a recognizable way to contemporary mathematics."
"Nasa's Voyager spacecraft have enthralled everyone with their exploits on the edge of the Solar System, but their launch in 1977 was only possible because of some clever maths and the persistence of a PhD student who worked out how to slingshot probes into deep space".
We have confused rigour at hand-calculating with rigour for the wider problem-solving subject of maths – the necessary hand mechanics of past moments with the enduring essence of maths.
Mount Holyoke physics professor Mark Peterson argues that Galileo's applications of mathematics to Dante's Inferno laid the groundwork for his later discoveries (to be expanded on in a forthcoming book: ""Galileo's Muse: Renaissance Mathematics and the Arts" )