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You are placed in front of a screen that is black save for one spot of red in the center, and are told to focus strictly and solely upon...

The nineteenth century saw Great Britain expanding vociferously into new markets, extending its influence, for better or worse, into...

A square, who works as a lawyer in the two-dimensional world of Flatland, sits down with his hexagonal grandson: Taking nine squares,...

It is a well-known fact of humanity that the chances of a group of people electing to do something decent and necessary is inversely...

It is a long standing saying* that the pantheon of primatology is essentially the Justice League of America, with Jane Goodall as...

Everybody needs love, but for some the striving after it so dominates their every action and decision that it becomes impossible to ever...

In the 1750s, when France was foundering scientifically in the Cartesian shallows, it took Émilie du Châtelet’s French translation of...

Content Note: By the end of this article, you are not going to like Albert Einstein much.  If this is a problem for you, if part of your...

In popular mythology, the 1687 publication of Newton’s Principia was the culminating moment when one human told the world how the...

What did Ada Lovelace do? She is one of the most fetishized scientists today - at conventions when I'm taking sketch commissions she...

In a room across the hall from where I teach, a group of a dozen kids between the ages of nine and thirteen are learning how to program...

For mathematicians, the only thing more exciting than proving a theorem is proving that it can never be proven. These anti-proofs, if you...

It is a thousand years ago. Europe is a stumbling, superstition-addled giant, depleting its energies on visions of holy violence and...

‘Well, some go this way, some go that way. But as for me, myself, personally, I prefer the short-cut.’ – The Cheshire Cat Every morning...

We are all mutants, our genes loaded with the steadily acquired variations of three billion years that gradually changed a collection of...

Mark your calendars! The third book in my Trailblazers of Women in STEM series for Pen & Sword Books, A History of Women in Mathematics,...

The life of Catherine de Parthenay (1554–1631) was dominated by national religious conflict and her decision to take a pivotal role of...

By 400 CE, Alexandria was submerged in a sea of political-religious rivalries that drew even the most innocuous seeming of scholars into...

One of the great things about writing this column is the fact that, from time to time, I get to talk with remarkable people about other...

If any century would have favourably understood the manic blend of child shaming and twisted pride that is the typical Toddlers and...