26 Nov A fly responsible for history’s most radical shifts in understanding mathematics?
If you have been the proverbial fly on the wall in Descartes’s bed-room in La Flèche, in southern France, in 1636, you may have watched Descartes laying in bed observing you. His most remarkable idea came to him while observing a fly crawl along a curved path, which he thought about illustrating in terms of its distance from the walls....