Cantor's Paradise is a Medium publication with articles on mathematicians and math topics like Ramanujan summation, Cantor, and von Neumann.
HN links it for accessible math articles, with a commenter calling its piece on the -1/12 derivation fantastic and others sharing mathematician profiles.
Paul Erdős
https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/the-mathematical-nomad-paul-erd%C5%91s-3163b70a2863
Over the years, Erdős accrued as much fame for his personality as he did for his mathematics. Described by his biographer Paul Hoffman as “probably the most eccentric mathematician in the world”, famously Erdős developed his only language to accompany his unique nomadic lifestyle, referring to himself as a PGOM, LD, AD, LD, CD, a “poor great old man, living dead, archaeological discovery, legally dead, counts dead”. Famously, possessions meant little Erdős, who carried most of his belongings in “two half-full suitcases” as he travelled from institution to institution, living with friends and colleagues.
Yes. Because of Gödel, von Neumann and others stopped trying to build machines that can prove anything.
Of course, following the critiques and further revisions of Zermelo’s set theory by Fraenkel, Skolem, Hilbert and von Neumann, a young mathematician by the name of Kurt Gödel in 1930 published a paper which would effectively end von Neumann’s efforts in formalist set theory, and indeed Hilbert’s formalist program altogether, his theorem of incompleteness. von Neumann happened to be in the audience when Gödel first presented it [1]
[1] https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/the-unparalleled-genius-of-john-von-neumann-791bb9f42a2d
> at the IAS received complaints for regularly playing extremely loud German march music on the gramophone in his office, distracting those in neighboring offices, including Albert Einstein. In fact, von Neumann claimed to do some of his best work in noisy, chaotic environments such as in the living room of his house with the television blaring. Despite being a bad driver, he loved driving, often while reading books, leading to various arrests and accidents.
https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/the-unparalleled-genius-of-john-von-neumann-791bb9f42a2d
In physics, it is something related to removing divergences in bosonic string theory, I am not an expert in that. Here, however, is a fantastic article that shows how -1/12 is actually derived: https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/the-ramanujan-summation-1-2-3-1-12-a8cc23dea793 (spoiler: it is really easy and could be done by a high schooler).
Yes, it has a long history. Like most math formulas, it back to Leonhard Euler. Ramanunan proved this series with his summation technique.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_%2B_2_%2B_3_%2B_4_%2B_%E2%8B%AF#Ramanujan_summation
[2] https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/the-ramanujan-summation-1-2-3-1-12-a8cc23dea793
It's a little bizarre that Kaczynski was a published mathematician of some note before he fell afoul of MK Ultra
https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/the-mathematics-of-ted-kaczynski-43eb6ca16633