Mathematicians Of The Day

16th June



On this day in 1902, Bertrand Russell wrote to Gottlob Frege to say that in his Grundgesetze der Arithmetik:
... there is just one point where I have encountered a difficulty.
The difficulty was the Russell Paradox. Frege responded
... your discovery of the contradiction caused me the greatest surprise and, I would almost say, consternation, since it has shaken the basis on which I intended to build arithmetic.

On this day in 2003 Google released an Escher doodle (a day early).

Click on for a poster.


Quotation of the day

From John Tukey
The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.
American Statistician 40 (1986)