Fermat's Library

Here's an interesting approximation for the number 8

In 1808, the French mathematician Christian Kramp introduced the "!" as the factorial symbol as a convenience to the printer. Before him, Euler, Stirling, and others, used more verbose notations like 𝑛⋅(𝑛−1)⋅(𝑛−2)⋯1

Fermat's Last Theorem (xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ) is not applicable to matrices

Brook Taylor was born in London exactly 340 years ago today 🎉 He introduced the Taylor series in 1715 as a way to approximate complicated functions using polynomials built from their derivatives at a point. The core idea: any smooth-enough function can be expressed locally as an infinite sum of polynomial terms, making analysis and computation easier.

On this day in 1877, astronomer Asaph Hall discovered Phobos, one of Mars' two moons, just 6 days after spotting Deimos! 🌑🔭

In 1927, 29 leading physicists met in Brussels at the Solvay Conference to debate quantum theory - 17 of them were Nobel Prize winners. This gathering saw Einstein and Bohr argue the nature of reality.

In 1972, John Conway posed an intriguing question about the Game of Life: could there exist a still life pattern that has no predecessor other than itself? A configuration that could only arise from itself in the previous generation, never from any other arrangement of living and dead cells. Conway attached a $50 prize to this problem. Fifty years later, in 2022, mathematicians Ilkka Törmä and Ville Salo finally provided an answer. They constructed a finite still life of 306 cells that indeed has the property Conway had wondered about - it has no predecessor other than itself.

An ångström is one ten-billionth of a meter (10⁻¹⁰ m). It's often used to measure the size of atoms, molecules, and wavelengths of light.

2³¹ − 1 is the typical INT_MAX for 32-bit signed integers. Fun Fact: it's also a Mersenne prime (M₃₁), the 8th known one. Euler proved its primality in 1772.

Erwin Schrödinger was born 138 years ago today. In 1933, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his pioneering contributions to quantum mechanics.