position:mathematician and meteorologist

The Tangled History of Big Bang Science - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/the-tangled-history-of-big-bang-science

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Diagram outlining the critical stages of evolution of the Universe from the Big Bang to the present.CERN / FlickrFor a theory of the universe as successful as the Big Bang, it may come as a surprise to realize how many complications its promoters had to stumble through. Let’s begin with the unfortunate figure of Alexander Friedmann, the brilliant Russian mathematician and meteorologist who was the first to exploit something remarkable about Einstein’s “field equations,” the set of ten equations that reimagined gravity as an outcome of curved spacetime. In 1917, Einstein, perhaps to not seem too out-there, argued that one could use the field equations to derive a model of the universe very much like the traditional Newtonian view—an eternally static, or “steady-state,” cosmos. The (...)

Coast Lines - Geographical

▻http://geographical.co.uk/places/mapping/item/1912-coast-lines

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Coasts are a more complex geographical entity than you might believe. Benjamin Hennig maps the world’s coasts to learn more

The question about the length of the world’s coastlines is not as easy to answer as it would initially seem. The British mathematician and meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson was among the first to investigate this phenomenon of the fractal nature of boundary lines in the early twentieth century. The rougher coastlines are, the more of a fractal nature they have and the more difficult it becomes to determine their length since this changes when looking at it using different scales and resolutions.

Richardson’s fellow mathematician, Benoit Mandelbrot, further investigated this phenomenon by looking at the length of the coast of Britain. He explained how the length of a coastline increases the smaller the ruler used for measuring. This has become known as the Coastline Paradox, since it suggests that the length of a coastline theoretically is infinite, or undefinable.

#cartographie #sémiologie #généralisation côtes