In teaching methodology to undergraduates I get great milage from philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970)’s analogy ‘Russell’s Teapot’: “If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided…

“We are now gods, but for the wisdom.” This essay is not about Bret Weinstein's false statements about COVID-19 treatments and vaccines. About a year and a half ago I wrote an essay about entrepreneur Stephen Wolfram’s — some say — boastful, misleading claims of having found a “path to…

“As far as I can see, there could be no theory of games … without that theorem … I thought there was nothing worth publishing until the Minimax Theorem was proved” — John von Neumann Hungarian polymath John von Neumann (1903–1957)’s legacy includes significant contributions to the foundations of mathematics…

“The examiner was intelligent enough to quickly quieten Gödel and say ‘Oh god, let’s not go into this’ and broke off the examination at this point, greatly to our relief” — Oskar Morgenstern Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) was the greatest logician who ever lived. At the age of 24, he revolutionized…

Implications of Condorcet’s jury theorem — There once lived a man named Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet (1743–1794). A mathematician and philosopher, his work was mainly focused on advancing social progress towards a more egalitarian society. For instance, he strongly advocated for gender equality as early as in 1787, when he wrote: …

“Although Abel shared with many mathematicians a complete lack of musical talent, I will not sound absurd if I compare his kind of productivity and his personality with Mozart’s.” — Felix Klein Niels Henrik Abel (1802–1829) died at age 26. Largely self-taught, during his short life the young Abel made…

“I had never seen anything in the least like [it] before” — G.H. Hardy On or about the 31st of January 1913, mathematician G.H. Hardy of Trinity College at Cambridge University received a parcel of papers from Madras, India. The package included a cover letter where a young clerk by…

“There is a rumor in America that there are two intelligent races on Earth: Humans and Hungarians” — Isaac Asimov “The Martians of Budapest”, sometimes simply “The Martians” is a colloquial term used to describe a group of prominent Hungarian physicists and mathematicians who emigrated to the United States following…

“Diagonalization seems to show that there is an inexhaustibility phenomenon for definability similar to that for provability” — Franzén (2004) In addition to his inventions of set theory and transfinite numbers, Georg Cantor (1845–1918) is remembered as the brilliant inventor of the popular diagonalization argument later employed by both Kurt…