Treasures of the Wiskunde Boek

© Madroon Community Consultants (MCC)

For the ridiculously low price of Eu 14,95 you can buy Het Wiskune Boek (The Mathematics Book(**)). Each of its more than 500 pages explains an important brick of the mighty edifice of mathematics, which was built over the millennia by a long line of rather clever people.

Flipping idly through its pages the other day, I suddenly noticed that the item for 2002 (see picture) described the work(*) of one of our very own ASTRON colleagues. Right there, between giants like Zeno, Euclid, Hypatia, Newton, Leibniz, Huygens, Euler, Fourier, Gauss, Galois, Cantor, Godel, Moron, Russell, Noether, Brouwer, Turing, Ulam, Jones, Mandelbrot, etc, etc.

That is the kind of person you might meet in the corridors of ASTRON, JIVE, NOVA and DOME.

(*) It proves that the 3500 year old African game Awari will always end in a draw if both players play perfectly.

(**) Unfortunately, the book is only available in Dutch. But note that the members of the august Royal Society, only a few centuries ago, learnt Dutch in order to be able to read the letters of Anthonie van Leeuwenhoek.