Mélanie Frappier

Interviewed for Scientific American about Genius at Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway, the biography of his life authored by Canadian journalist Siobhan Roberts, the renowned mathematician reminisces about his encounter with the fabled French mathematician Nicolas Bourbaki. This would have been a meeting of the minds. Bourbaki had been behind the “New Math” movement that briefly swept the American school system in the wake of the Sputnik…

While studying British statistical data, 19th–century economist Robert Malthus realized that if trends continued, population would necessarily outgrow food resources. This in turn, Malthus argued, meant that the future held in store unavoidable cycles of famine. He thus concluded, somewhat cynically, that charity toward the indigent was not only useless, but also exacerbated the problem by depleting society’s resources to help the poor survive and…

The first talk given by physicist John Moffat, back in 1953, was a fiasco. Only 19, he had not expected his audience to be hostile to someone trying to extend Einstein’s unified field theory. Alone and distraught by the condescending reaction of his audience, the young Moffat impulsively decided to write to Albert Einstein himself. “I have today held a talk on my work with regard to your theory at the Niels Bohr…