This course is a journey through the history of mathematics, focusing on the foremost mathematicians of all time, the great thinkers, and the extraordinary masterpieces they produced, the great theorems.

As the United States raced against Russia to put a man in space, NASA found untapped talent in a group of African-American female mathematicians that served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in U.S. history. Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Johnson crossed all gender, race, and professional lines while their brilliance and desire to dream big, beyond anything ever accomplished before by the human race, firmly cemented...

"A biography of Sophie Germain, who grew up during the French Revolution and followed her dream of studying mathematics, becoming the first woman to win a grand prize from the Royal Academy of Sciences and changing the world with her discoveries"--

Before John Glenn orbited the Earth or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of professionals worked as "Human Computers," calculating the flight paths that would enable these historic achievements. Among these were a coterie of bright, talented African-American women. Segregated from their white counterparts by Jim Crow laws, these "colored computers," as they were known, used slide rules, adding machines, and pencil and paper to support America's...

"A story centered around one of the great geniuses of the modern age, the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the uncanny circuit of his mind deep into our own time's most haunting dilemmas"--

"Even by 1800s standards, Ada Byron Lovelace had an unusual upbringing. Her narcissistic mother worked hard at cultivating her own role as martyred ex-wife of bad-boy poet Lord Byron and had Ada tutored at home by some of the brightest minds. Ada developed a hunger for mental puzzles, mathematical conundrums, and scientific discovery that kept pace with the breathtaking advances of the industrial and social revolutions taking place in Europe. At seventeen,...

A compelling portrait of a woman who saw the potential for numbers to make art!

Presents information about Ada Lovelace, from her childhood in England and her studies in mathematics to her development of the first computer programming language.

Meet Katherine Johnson, a brilliant mathematician who worked at NASA in the early 1950s until retiring in 1986. Katherine's unparalleled calculations (done by hand) helped plan the trajectories for NASA's Mercury and Apollo missions (including the Apollo 11 moon landing). She is said to be one of the greatest American minds of all time.

During World War II, when the newly minted Jet Propulsion Laboratory needed quick-thinking mathematicians to calculate jet velocities and plot missile trajectories, they recruited an elite group of young women -- known as human computers -- who, with only pencil, paper, and mathematical prowess, transformed rocket design and helped bring about America's first ballistic missiles. But they were never interested in developing weapons -- their hearts...