2029 Binomi

This minor planet is not named after a mathematician. Or rather, it is named after the mathematician for whom the Binomial Theorem is supposedly named. I will quote the Minor Planet Circular [M. 6208] directly, because it tells a great story: This minor planet, five ahead of (2034) Bernoulli, is named for the mythical inventor of mathematical formulae. It seems that a student, on being asked when Binomi lived, credited him with having been a contempory of Newton, a response that became notorious around the university. A few years later another student, on being asked when Bernoulli lived, immediately answered: "I'm not going to fall into that trap; it is well known that the man never existed!" This minor planet goes out to all you mathematicians and pranksters out there — the former, in my experience, a proper subset of the latter. The symbol of this minor planet follows in the joke narrative of a the Bernoulli-esque mathematician who discovered the binomial theorem. It is a compostition of the symbol for 2034 Bernoulli, and the representation of a binomial coefficient. < prev | 2029 | next >

Comments

Post preview:

Close preview

	or Sign in as Wikidot user
	(will not be published)

- +

Help: wiki text quick reference