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A sheet of Thomas Jefferson stamps.
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Thomas Jefferson Fights for the Metric System

A story of math and political stasis.
by Amir Alexander via HNN on June 5, 2024
John Von Neumann and computer charts.

The World John von Neumann Built

Game theory, computers, the atom bomb—these are just a few of things von Neumann played a role in developing, changing the 20th century for better and worse.
by David Nirenberg via The Nation on November 28, 2022
Stack of calculus textbooks.
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Racism In Our Curriculums Isn’t Limited to History. It’s in Math, Too.

Let's recognize the scholar who was behind the other "CRT."
by Theodore Kim via Made By History on December 8, 2021
Several stores in a 20th century shopping mall

Paul Samuelson Brought Mathematical Economics to the Masses

Paul Samuelson’s mathematical brilliance changed economics, but it was his popular touch that made him a household name.
by Roger Backhouse via Aeon on February 10, 2020

Three Times Political Conflict Reshaped American Mathematics

How mathematics has been shaped by wars, politics, dynasties, and nationalism.
by Della Dumbaugh via The Conversation on April 2, 2019
Painting of a person doing arithemetic.
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Solve for AI

What the history of the pocket calculator reveals about the future of AI in classrooms.
by Bronwen Everill via HNN on April 30, 2025
Peter Waddell's "A Vision Unfolds" imaginatively depicts Benjamin Banneker advising President Washington and fellow surveyor Andrew Ellicott on the layout of the proposed federal capital.

Banneker’s Answer to Jefferson: “I Am an American”

The black naturalist, astronomer, surveyor, and almanac-writer Benjamin Banneker took issue with Thomas Jefferson’s attitude toward “those of my complexion.”
by Edward J. Larson via American Heritage on November 21, 2023
Illustration of Chalude Shannon, William Weaver, and Italo Calvino, placed on a background of binary code

Language Machinery: Who Will Attend to the Machine's Writing?

The ultimate semantic receivers, selectors, and transmitters are still us.
by Richard Hughes Gibson via The Hedgehog Review on November 7, 2023
Photo of Joseph Weizenbaum against a collage of antiwar protests and code.

‘A Certain Danger Lurks There’: How the Inventor of the First Chatbot Turned Against AI

Computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum was there at the dawn of artificial intelligence– but he was also adamant that we must never confuse computers with humans.
by Ben Tarnoff via The Guardian on July 25, 2023
The sixty-four hexagrams from the King Wen sequence of the I Ching.

The I Ching in America

Europeans translated the "Chinese Book of Changes" in the nineteenth century, but the philosophy really took off in the West after 1924.
by Livia Gershon, Richard J. Smith via JSTOR Daily on May 4, 2023
Names, dates, and statistics written on lined notebook paper.

The Forgotten Men Behind the Ideas That Changed Baseball

Solving baseball’s enduring puzzles, to those who could even see them, was its own reward. They changed everything but were never given their due.
by Leander Schaerlaeckens via Defector on November 14, 2022
The Police Beat Algorithm, along with its computational key. Illustrated by Kelly Chudler.

The 1960s Experiment That Created Today’s Biased Police Surveillance

The Police Beat Algorithm’s outputs were not so much predictive of future crime as they were self-fulfilling prophesies.
by Charlton D. McIlwain via Slate on November 11, 2022
Cartoon of Buckminster Fuller with spirals in his glasses and hands out as if hypnotizing the reader.

Space-Age Magus

From beginning to end, experts saw through Buckminster Fuller’s ideas and theories. Why did so many people come under his spell?
by James Gleick via New York Review of Books on November 3, 2022
Illustration of Benjamin Franklin overlaid on textbook excerpt

Ben Franklin Put an Abortion Recipe in His Math Textbook

To colonial Americans, termination was as normal as the ABCs and 123s.
by Molly Farrell via Slate on May 5, 2022
Woodcut illustration from 1934 economics textbook depicting people walking from tenement houses past an advertising billboard and straight to a loan office.

Bad Economics

How microeconomic reasoning took over the very institutions of American governance.
by Simon Torracinta via Boston Review on March 9, 2022
Illustration of John von Neumann surrounded by mathematical formulas, by Valentin Pavageau

John von Neumann Thought He Had the Answers

The father of game theory helped develop the atom bomb—and thought he could calculate when to use it.
by Samanth Subramanian via The New Republic on March 8, 2022
Portrait of William Small, by Tilly Kettle, c. 1765.
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The Revolution Whisperer

The overlooked first mentor of Thomas Jefferson.
by Greg Shaw via HNN on February 20, 2022
Abstract drawing of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe, Crank Scientist

The great discoveries of the age captivated Poe’s imagination. He almost always misunderstood them.
by Colin Dickey via The New Republic on July 21, 2021
"House Arrest" report cover

House Arrest

How an automated algorithm constrained Congress for a century.
by Dan Bouk via Data & Society on April 14, 2021

How Eugenics Shaped Statistics

Exposing the damned lies of three science pioneers.
by Aubrey Clayton via Nautilus on October 28, 2020
Poppy Northcutt.

Inside Apollo Mission Control, From the Eyes of the First Woman on the Job

Poppy Northcutt planned the vital flight trajectories that got astronauts home from their missions to the moon.
by Erin Blakemore via National Geographic on July 18, 2019
Margaret Hamilton stands next to a stack of paper as tall as she is - the software she and her team produced for the Apollo project.

The Hidden Heroines of Chaos

Two women programmers played a pivotal role in the birth of chaos theory. Their previously untold story illustrates the changing status of computation in science.
by Joshua Sokol via Quanta on May 20, 2019

The Physics Of Why Timekeeping First Failed In The Americas

The world's greatest clockmaker sent a clock to the new world – and everything went haywire.
by Ethan Siegel via Forbes on September 21, 2018

Explaining the 'Mystery' of Numbers Stations

The stations' broadcasts have been attributed to aliens and Cold War relics, but they actually are coded intelligence messages.
by Maris Goldmanis via War on the Rocks on May 24, 2018
Sign saying "WHIP INFLATION NOW" with image of Uncle Sam whipping a personification of inflation

The Rise of Inflation

Understanding how inflation came to be a mainstay in modern economics.
by Rebecca L. Spang via Cabinet on June 14, 2013
<p>Earth rising over the Moon, captured by Lunar Orbiter 1, 1966. Courtesy NASA/<a href="https://www.planetary.org/articles/1238" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Planetary Society</a></p>

How the Scientists of the 1960s Turned the Moon into a Place

For most of history, the Moon was regarded as a mysterious and powerful object. Then scientists made it into a destination.
by Danny Robb via Aeon on February 13, 2025
A West Village, New York pizza restaurant.

What Should Econ 101 Courses Teach Students Today?

Why introductory economics courses continued to teach zombie ideas from before economics became an empirical discipline.
by Walter Frick via Aeon on June 7, 2024
The Confederate States Almanac

On Harvests and Histories

Almanacs from the Civil War era reveal how two sides of an embattled nation used data from the natural world to legitimize their claims to statehood.
by Teresa A. Goddu, Jill Spivey Caddell, Khalid Salim Isma'El, A. R. George, T. J. Tomlin via JSTOR Daily on January 3, 2024
Abacus, mathemeticians, and zeros and ones.

How Everything Became Data

The rise and rise and rise of data.
by Ben Tarnoff via The Nation on October 16, 2023
A multi-colored print of James Garfield and his family in their library

A President of Many Talents

James Garfield is known primarily for being assassinated. But his life reveals the character of nineteenth-century America.
by John O. McGinnis via Law & Liberty on August 24, 2023
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