Thatsmaths

Stanislaw Ulam, born in Poland in 1909, was a key member of the remarkable Lvov School of Mathematics, which flourished in that city between the two w(...)

Geodesy is the study of Earth’s shape and size, and of variations in its gravitational field. Earth was originally believed to be flat, but many clues(...)

Joseph Fourier, born just 250 years ago, introduced a wonderful idea that revolutionised science and mathematics: any function or signal can be broken(...)

Western civilization woke with a start after the slumbers of the medieval age. Universities in Bologna, Oxford, Salamanca, Paris and elsewhere began t(...)

We are reminded each year to get vaccinated against the influenza virus. The severity of the annual outbreak is not known with certainty in advance, b(...)

In 1971, astronaut David Scott, standing on the moon, dropped a hammer and a feather and found that both reached the surface at the same time. This po(...)

The atmospheric temperature at a fixed spot may change in two ways. First, heat sources or sinks may increase or decrease the thermal energy; for exam(...)

At five litres per minute the average human heart pumps nearly 200 megalitres of blood through the body in a lifetime. Heart disease causes 40 per cen(...)

We are all familiar with the measurement of speed, the distance travelled in a given time. Allowing for the direction as well as the magnitude of move(...)

Today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. We might expect that the latest sunrise and earliest sunset also occur today. In fact, the(...)