(Roughly) Daily

Dictionary of Numbers is an award-winning Google Chrome extension that tries to make sense of numbers encountered on the web by providing descriptions of those numbers in human terms.  Just as a dictionary describes words one doesn’t know in terms one does, so Dictionary of Numbers puts unfamiliar quantities in understandable, recognizable terms… “Because ‘8 million people’ means nothing, but ‘population of New York City’ means everything.”

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As we graduate from our fingers and toes, we might spare a thought for Jules Henri Poincaré; he died on this date in 1912.  A mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and a philosopher of science, Poincaré is considered the “last Universalist” in math– the last mathematician to excel in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime.

Poincaré was a co-discoverer (with Einstein and Lorentz) of the special theory of relativity; he laid the foundations for the fields of topology and chaos theory; and he had a huge impact on cosmogony.  His famous “Conjecture” held that if any loop in a given three-dimensional space can be shrunk to a point, the space is equivalent to a sphere; it remained unsolved until Grigori Perelman completed a proof in 2003.

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