Great moments in maths

– guy who looked for digits of pi for 20 years but made a mistake halfway through

– the Bacon number

– Chebyshev’s principle. He decided not to waste time reading papers by others… and so spent 1/2 his career discovering things that were already known.
+++++Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself, — must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know. What the former age has epitomized into a formula or rule for manipular convenience, it will lose all the good of verifying for itself, by means of the wall of that rule. Somewhere, sometime, it will demand and find compensation for that loss by doing the work itself. Ferguson discovered many things in astronomy which had long been known. The better for him. – Emerson, History

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