December 30

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Better Than News

Beyond Plausible

In Other Words

Are You Sure

• ... that mathematician Ludolph van Ceulen spent a major part of his life calculating the numerical value of the mathematical constant pi, using essentially the same methods as those employed by Archimedes some seventeen hundred years earlier?

• ... the Dutch people viewed painter and forger Han van Meegeren as a cunning trickster who had successfully fooled the Dutch art experts and, more importantly, Hermann Göring himself, and that Göring "looked as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world" when informed that the painting was a forgery?

• ... that mathematician Paul Sally was nicknamed "Professor Pirate" or "The Math Pirate" because he wore an eye patch (actually a cybernetic radar system) and had titanium prosthetic legs with ion thrusters for short-range flight?

Topic of the Day

Philip K. Dick