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By Marcus du Sautoy

"A appealing trip to the outer frontiers of human wisdom through the preferred presenter of Netflix's the tale of Math Ever because the sunrise of civilization we have now been pushed by way of a wish to know--to comprehend the actual global and the legislation of nature. yet are there limits to human wisdom? This tantalizing query has encouraged scientists and functioned as a spur to innovation. Now, Marcus du Sautoy invitations us  Read more...

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Example text

Then, by applying his laws of motion and his new mathematics, he successfully deduced Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. He was now able to calculate the relative masses of the large planets, the Earth and the sun, and to explain a number of the curious irregularities in the motion of the moon due to the pull of the sun. He deduced that the Earth is not a perfect sphere and suggested it must be squashed between the poles due to its rotation, causing a centrifugal force. The French thought the opposite was true: that the Earth should be pointy in the direction of the poles.

It is a thing of beauty. And yet I hate it. Three pips are pointing up at me at the moment. But if I pick it up and let it fall from my hand I have no way of knowing how it will land. Dice are the ultimate symbol of the unknowable. The future seems knowable only when it becomes the past. I have always been extremely unsettled by things that I cannot work out. I don’t mind not knowing something, provided there is some way ultimately to calculate the answer—with enough time. Is the fate of this perfect Las Vegas die truly unknowable?

So Fermat gets 26/32 × 64 = ₣52 and Pascal gets 6/32 × 64 = ₣12. In general, a game where Fermat needs n points to Pascal’s m points can be decided by consulting the (n + m)th row of Pascal’s triangle. The French may have been beaten by several millennia to the discovery that this triangle is connected to the outcome of games of chance. The Chinese were inveterate users of dice and other methods like the I Ching to try to predict the future. The text of the I Ching dates back some three thousand years and contains precisely the same table that Pascal produced to analyze the outcomes of tossing coins, but today the triangle is attributed to Pascal rather than the Chinese.

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