TAKING a break from tapping at the terminal, Netropolitan was scanning last week’s New Scientist and came across a letter repeating the popular myth that the reason there is no Nobel Prize for maths is that Mrs Nobel was caught in flagrante delicto with a mathematician. It’s an intriguing notion and might well be true except for one small fact – Alfred Nobel never married.
The mystery of the missing Nobel prize is solved on the Maths Frequently Asked Questions page at http://daisy.uwaterloo.ca/-alopez-o/math-faq/math-faq.html, along with how to cut up spheres to make them larger, what Euler’s theorem is and why 0.999 … equals 1. The page is refreshingly well stocked, and up-to-date enough for the entry on Fermat’s last theorem to include the latest revisions of the proof.
And why isn’t there a Nobel prize for maths? It seems that Nobel didn’t perceive maths as offering any benefit to civilisation. It’s an interesting point of view from a man who got rich from blowing things up.
