Where the Formulas Came From

If the cards ask who found what, this series asks what the formula is saying. The origins of equations that were only ever memorised at school.

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Leg 1 · Pythagoras' Theorem — The Most-Used Formula There Is

1. 1BC 530The Pythagoreans
2. 2BC 300Euclid · Elements
3. 31637Descartes · Coordinates
4. 41854Bernhard Riemann · The geometry of curved space

Leg 2 · How Pi Was Computed

5. 5BC 250Archimedes
6. 6628Brahmagupta · Zero
7. 71748Leonhard Euler

Leg 3 · Why Logarithms Matter — Turning Multiplication into Addition

8. 81614John Napier · Logarithms
9. 91609Kepler

Leg 4 · What Differentiation Is — Measuring Change at an Instant

10. 101360Nicole Oresme
11. 111687Newton · Principia

Leg 5 · What Integration Is — Slice Everything and Add It Up

12. 121822Joseph Fourier

Leg 6 · How the Earth Was Weighed

13. 131798Henry Cavendish · The density of Earth
14. 14BC 240Eratosthenes

Leg 7 · How the Distance to the Moon Was Measured

15. 15BC 270Aristarchus
16. 16BC 130Hipparchus
17. 171838Friedrich Bessel · Stellar parallax

Leg 8 · How the Size of Our Galaxy Was Measured

18. 181912Henrietta Leavitt
19. 191929Edwin Hubble

Leg 9 · The Wave Equation — It Pulls Back as Hard as It Is Bent

20. 201865Maxwell
21. 211926Schrödinger

Updated 2026-09-12