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"On the whole, mathematicians dont have a particularly great image."
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Christopher Budd (mathematician)But they then discovered something else, and... had to extend numbers — Christopher Budd (mathematician)
"But they then discovered something else, and... had to extend numbers a bit more. Suppose a farmer has a field and that field grows 100 cabbages. ...[T]he king wants to have a war so they need... 200 cabbages. How much bigger should my field be? ...It needs to have twice the area, and the area... is proportional to the square of the length of the field, so... how much bigger should the length of the field be, and the equation that you have to solve... is[W]e know the ns were interested in this problem because... a cuneiform tablet, which I believe is in the ... is... trying to solve this equation.... and... gives the answer. ...[T]hey tried to solve this using fractions and they... couldnt. There was no fraction which equaled the answer... and so they had to invent... what we call an irrational number to give a solution... 1.4142135623730950488... Thats to 20 decimal places, and it goes on and on and on. ...[T]hese were numbers called s, and were originally invented for the tax man to work out how to double the area of fields."
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Christopher Budd (mathematician)
Christopher Budd (mathematician)
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Christopher John Budd is a British mathematician known especially for his contribution to non-linear differential equations and their applications in industry. He is currently Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Bath, and was Professor of Geometry at Gresham College from 2016 to 2020.
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"The technology that we celebrate today, everything we do, is all heavily based on math. In my pocket I have my ... absolutely stuffed full of mathematics, and lots of mathematicians work in the smart phone industry."
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Christopher Budd (mathematician)Quote
"[T]he shame about all of this is not only is it not true. Its really, really, really not true! ...Math is basically the basis of the modern world. The modern world would simply not exist without mathematics."
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Christopher Budd (mathematician)Quote
"If there wasnt air around me, Id die very very quickly... and math is like that for technology. Take the math away, the technology fails, but just like the air around us its invisible, and lots of people dont know its there."
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Christopher Budd (mathematician)Quote
"The was... one of the first scientific research establishments in the U.K. ...They reckon about 30 elements were discovered in the Royal Institution. A number of s came out of the Royal Institution. Humphry Davy worked in the Royal Institution, the Braggs [William Henry and Lawrence]... [etc.,] but possibly the most famous... was... Michael Faraday... [H]e discovered experimentally the link between electricity and magnetism and... essentially invented the and the , and those have then been developed by people like Edison and Tesla into the power generation system we so celebrate today."
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Christopher Budd (mathematician)Quote
"[S]ome people are... quite frightened of math, or even... suspicious of math."
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Christopher Budd (mathematician)