CTK Insights

Going through a stack of math magazines collecting dust at a corner of my home office, I came across a September 17, 2008 quote from the future Vice President Joe Biden at a campaign rally (Am Math Monthly, v 116, n 4, p 341. Thanks to Pamela Pierce): Remember your calculus class, you learned about [...]

On January 28, 1986 the shuttle Challenger exploded 72 seconds after the lift-off. All seven astronauts perished in the explosion. Who does not remember this horrible disaster? Next to this memory, I have stored the famous, broadly televised presentation of Richard Feynmann's experimental demonstration. It was so simple, one could not help but wonder why [...]

Albert Einstein's dictum "God does not play dice" is a concise expression of determinism - the belief that the past fully determines the future. Had it been possible to write down all the required equations and feasible to solve them, we would have had a complete picture of the future. Quantum mechanics recognized randomness as [...]

In an odd sort of events I came across a quote from an old Russian chess book. The author instructed his readers to place the rook behind a pawn, as long as it was a correct move. Wisdom to live by. I was reading City of Thieves by David Benioff - an American writer, a [...]