Learn with us!

Why?

Throughout our activity and career, ever since we were students, and finally, teaching ourselves, our conviction is that the basis of all learning experiences and activities is communication and collaboration.

Another important motivation is the interest in learning and understanding things in their context. As we progressed in our studies and finally during our PhDs, it became increasingly clear that mathematics in particular and science in general is not only about formulae, equations, theorems, and proofs. Even if we understand the message that a theorem carries, most of the time, the historical context, the biographies of scientists, as well as the philosophical discussions around them can only enrich our knowledge. We all grew up with a superhero-like image of Albert Einstein, Sir Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, Richard Feynman, Pythagoras, but the truth is that only rarely does a scientific breakthrough happen in isolation.

“Standing on the shoulders of giants” was Newton’s way of expressing his gratitude to his intellectual ancestors. Hence, we cannot help but ask ourselves How did a researcher reach this idea?, astonished by their creativity, but also by their sheer work. The answer usually comes by studying the open questions in the respective historical period.

Our favourite example is that of non-Euclidean geometry, attributed to the German Carl Friedrich Gauss, the Hungarian János Bolyai, and the Russian Nikolai Lobachevsky. When one studies the theory itself, it seems unbelievably new, completely different from anything that was studied around and before the nineteenth century. But in its historical context, it becomes a continuation of pursuits stemming from rather practical issues, such as military technology and ballistics. Motivated by understanding curvature, the three worked independently to describe it mathematically, thus reaching what we presently know as hyperbolic, elliptic, and parabolic geometry.

Definitely not least, the philosophical whys have sparked innumerable fascinating ideas, and the collaboration and communication between philosophy, mathematics, and natural science has led to beautiful theories such as logicism, structuralism, and intuitionism — to speak only of the nineteenth century onwards.