Category: Mathematics

The list below is believed complete, though membership — like everything here — is subject to revision.

• The doctrinal value of π — The belief that π ought to be a clean, rational number — most often 3.2 — once very nearly fixed by a vote of the Indiana legislature.
• Eratosthenes — Greek polymath (c. 276–194 BC) who measured the Earth's circumference to within a few percent — the figure whole-radian geometry declines to address.
• Flat — Of no curvature anywhere — a plane. A stronger condition than 'level' or 'horizontal': a tilted floor is flat but not level, and still water is level but not flat.
• Johannes Kepler — German astronomer (1571–1630) who found the planets move in ellipses, after first building a lovelier, wrong model of nested Platonic solids; a founder of modern optics.
• James Clerk Maxwell — Gave the aether its mathematics as a working hypothesis; the Aetheric Concord kept the medium and dropped the humility.
• Isaac Newton — English natural philosopher (1643–1727) whose universal gravitation the flat-Earth tradition never forgave, and who spent as much effort on alchemy and biblical chronology as on physics.
• Radian — The standard SI unit of plane angle (≈ 57.2958°) — and the encyclopedia's most misread object.
• Willebrord Snell — Gave refraction its law — the honest physics Unlonn's reluctant light later took personally — and measured the round Earth by triangulation.

← All categories