Fermat's Library

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A platform for illuminating academic papers. We annotate and share a paper every week. Save, annotate and share papers with anyone: https://t.co/0o2Pls3jmo

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Fermat's Library

Shorts

The Oldham coupling, invented in 1821 by John Oldham, is used to transfer torque between axles that don't exactly line up

WWII story: When Nazis invaded Copenhagen, chemist George de Hevesy dissolved two Nobel Prize gold medals in acid rather than let them be stolen. The orange solution sat unnoticed on a lab shelf throughout the occupation. After the war, he recovered the gold & the medals were reminted. 🏅

Planetary Orbits visualized in the Heliocentric ☀️ and Geocentric 🌎 Systems.

Videos

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Noam Chomsky on free will: If you believe there's no free will, why bother presenting an argument?

Freeman Dyson on the importance of cheap space travel

Andrew Wiles on the morning he discovered how to fix his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

American physicist Edward Witten explains why it wasn’t until Einstein's work that we fully understand the reason behind the inverse square law, and why it's specifically a square rather than some arbitrary decimal 1 / distance² vs. 1 / distance¹·⁷⁴⁸²²⋅⋅⋅

Dijkstra on why he believed programmers should stop using the term "bug"

Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel prize-winning physicist, on contemplating suicide at 18 after getting into graduate school at MIT

AI pioneer John McCarthy reflects on AI’s earliest critics

American physicist Edward Witten explains why it wasn’t until Einstein's work that we fully understand the reason behind the inverse square law, and why it's specifically a square rather than some arbitrary decimal 1 / distance² vs. 1 / distance¹·⁷⁴⁸²²⋅⋅⋅

Marvin Minsky recalls how John Nash effortlessly solved his PhD problem

Why the last digit of n⁵ is equal to the last digit of n 2⁵=32 4⁵=1024 5⁵=3125

Computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra on the frustration of debugging a program you wrote yourself

Freeman Dyson on how he struggled to learn quantum mechanics from Paul Dirac

"There are only two kinds of modern math books: Those you cannot read beyond the first sentence, and those you cannot read beyond the first page" - C.N. Yang (Nobel laureate in Physics)

Feynman on solving hard problems

At Princeton, Feynman became obsessed with this question: What happens when a sprinkler sucks in water instead of spraying it out? Seems simple, but the physics is surprisingly subtle.

Feynman on the Scientific Method

A one-line proof of the infinitude of primes

Bernard Chazelle proved that if each bird adjusts its velocity and position to the other birds within a fixed radius, the time it takes to converge to a steady state tends to infinity as the number of birds increases.