Triangles, Ratios, and Pi: How the Ancient Greeks Tamed the GodsMaster ClassIn-Person
Sunday, Apr 11, 2027
9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
TBA
The ancient Greeks looked at the sky and saw gods. Then a few of them looked again and saw geometry. It was a momentous discovery: the heavens were not beyond human understanding. With nothing more than reason and a few simple tools, human beings could begin to unlock the secrets of the universe. The gods had not surrendered their power. Humanity had discovered its own. In this master class, mathematician Alex Kontorovich reframes mathematics as an audacious human adventure. You'll discover how Hipparchus used triangles to chart the sun and moon and helped turn eclipses from signs of divine anger into predictable events; how Archimedes trapped the value of π between polygons drawn inside and outside a circle; and how, nearly two thousand years later, Isaac Newton used an infinite series to calculate π to fifteen decimal places. You'll leave with stories that bring trigonometry, calculus, and π to life for your students.
MATHEMATICS, TRIGONOMETRY, GEOMETRY, CALCULUS, ASTRONOMY, HISTORY
3 credits
CTLE credit available
Alex Kontorovich
Alex Kontorovich is a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University whose research centers on analytic number theory, automorphic forms, hyperbolic geometry, and dynamics. He earned his B.A. from Princeton University in 2002 and his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2007. A fellow of the American Mathematical Society, he received a Sloan Research Fellowship and the 2014 Levi L. Conant Prize from the American Mathematical Society for his expository paper "From Apollonius to Zaremba: Local-global phenomena in thin orbits". He served as the 2020–2021 visiting chair for the public dissemination of mathematics at the National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath), where he serves as dean of academic content.