Curated playlist
20th-century American mathematicians
- Henry J. KelleyA 1960 flight-path paper by Henry J. Kelley derived the basic mathematics behind backpropagation.
- Katherine JohnsonKatherine Johnson was the mathematician an astronaut asked for by name. NASA was using electronic computers for the first time to calculate John Glenn's orbit of the Earth. Officials turned to Johnson to verify the machine's numbers,…
- Claude ShannonClaude Shannon built a mechanical mouse that learned its way through a maze. He named the 1950 machine Theseus.
- Walter PittsWalter Pitts, a homeless teenager, helped create the first mathematical model of a neural network.
- Ted KaczynskiTed Kaczynski wrote a letter to The New York Times in 1995 and attached a promise to it. If the Times or The Washington Post printed his essay in full, he would "desist from terrorism." The essay ran to roughly 35,000 words and carried the…
- Pope Leo XIVBefore the 2025 conclave, the future Pope Leo XIV, Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, explained his chances to a friend by text message. "I'm an American, I can't be elected," he wrote. He was elected anyway. This documentary follows a path…
- Hilary PutnamHilary Putnam invented a leading theory of the mind, then spent years taking it apart.
- Jim SimonsJim Simons, born James Harris Simons, once explained his dislike of publicity by borrowing a line from Benjamin the Donkey in Animal Farm. "God gave me a tail to keep off the flies. But I'd rather have had no tail and no flies. That's kind…
- Kurt GödelIn 1931, Kurt Gödel proved that any sufficiently powerful math system contains true statements it cannot prove.
- Grace HopperGrace Hopper hung a clock on her office wall that ran counterclockwise. She wanted code in plain English.
- Subrahmanyan ChandrasekharSubrahmanyan Chandrasekhar sailed from India to England in 1930, and on that first sea voyage he worked out a number that would outlive him. The number was 1.44. It is the greatest mass, counted in suns, that a white dwarf star can have. A…