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Mathematics
Where the formulas you memorised actually came from.
8 pieces
- Where the Formulas Came From Pythagoras' Theorem — The Most-Used Formula There Is Square two sides of a right triangle, add them, and you get the square of the third. At school it is a formula to memorise. In practice it reappears wherever land is measured, distance is computed, or the shape of space is questioned. 4 questions
- Where the Formulas Came From How Pi Was Computed Divide any circle's circumference by its diameter and the same number appears. The trouble is that the number cannot be written down exactly. For more than two thousand years people have been squeezing it. 3 questions
- Where the Formulas Came From Why Logarithms Matter — Turning Multiplication into Addition Logarithms rank among the least loved topics in school mathematics. Yet without them astronomers might have drowned in arithmetic. What a logarithm does is one thing: it turns multiplication into addition. 3 questions
- Where the Formulas Came From What Differentiation Is — Measuring Change at an Instant A speedometer shows your speed at this instant. But speed is distance divided by time, and an instant is zero time — and you cannot divide by zero. Differentiation is the way around that contradiction. 4 questions
- Where the Formulas Came From What Integration Is — Slice Everything and Add It Up If differentiation looks into an instant, integration does the opposite: it adds up countless small pieces to recover the whole. That these two operations undo each other is the heart of calculus. 4 questions
- Where the Formulas Came From The Wave Equation — It Pulls Back as Hard as It Is Bent An equation that began with a violin string ended up writing sound, light, earthquakes and electrons in one language. What it says is startlingly simple: the more sharply something is bent, the harder it snaps back. 4 questions
- Science in Korea — What Is Being Built Here Supercomputers — Experimenting on What Cannot Be Experimented On What happens when two galaxies collide? You cannot find out by doing it — a billion years, and no galaxies to hand. So a third method was invented. The national supercomputer is run by the science information institute in Daejeon. 3 questions
- Science in Korea — What Is Being Built Here Cryptography — Why the Lock Is Handed to Everyone Can you exchange a secret with a stranger, in a room where everyone is listening, having agreed nothing beforehand? It sounds impossible, and we do it dozens of times a day. It works because some calculations are easy in one direction only. 2 questions