Mathematicians Of The Day

28th March



On this day in 1949, the phrase "Big Bang" was created. Fred Hoyle used the term on the BBC's Third Program, in describing theories that contrasted with his own "continuous creation" model for the Universe.
...based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang ...
He intended it as a pejorative, but the name caught on.

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Quotation of the day

From Alexander Grothendieck
The introduction of the cipher 0 or the group concept was general nonsense too, and mathematics was more or less stagnating for thousands of years because nobody was around to take such childish steps ...
In a letter in 1982 to Ronald Brown