Lunch hour lectures repository Spring 2009
- Does rule learning make us human?
- The man who invented the concept of pi: William Jones and his circle
- President Obama and America in the World: from inauguration to action
- The Reception of Homer in Byzantium
- Photodynamic Therapy: using light in a gentle approach to cancer therapy by remote control
- One World Week
- Still no black in the union jack
- Darwin Day
- Modelling how water vapour absorbs light
- Children and the environment: independence or obesity?
- Physiology on top of the world - Xtreme Everest
- The future of Brazil
- Sorry, can you say that again..?
- One person households - a resource time bomb?
- Mimicking tissue growth: towards customised, while-you-wait tissue fabrication
- What have the lawyers ever done for us? Law, culture and international agricultural trade
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The man who invented the concept of pi: William Jones and his circle
3 December 2008
Patricia Rothman (UCL Mathematics)
William Jones was important in his lifetime primarily for three things: he was the first person to use the Greek letter π in its modern sense; he had acquired such a significant archive of manuscripts that he was appointed to the Royal Society committee, to investigate the invention of calculus; and he was influential as communicator in a network of mathematicians, astronomers and natural philosophers in the early eighteenth century.
This lecture will also touch on the lives of some of the notable characters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who contributed to his story.
Page last modified on 03 dec 08 12:57
