King, Minos, Crete, Athenians, Minotaur, Theseus, Ariadne, Guiseppe, Peano, Mandelbrot

THE MYTH
King Minos of Crete demanded of the Athenians seven youths and maidens every nine years as an offering to the Minotaur, a bull-headed monster that lived in the Cretan labyrinth that Daedalus built. Theseus volunteered to try to defeat the monster. He successfully navigated the labyrinth using a ball of string given him by Ariadne and slew the Minotaur.

THE MATH

Guiseppe Peano (1858-1932)
The Italian mathematician and logician Peano described in 1890 a curve that could pass through every point of a square. The idea was considered monstrous and nonintuitive until Mandelbrot showed that it beautifully modeled nature such as watersheds and trees, and was not pathological. Peano also introduced many notations in symbolic logic, and set theory and presented the axiom that zero is a number.

Next Scene >>


King, Minos, Crete, Athenians, Minotaur, Theseus, Ariadne, Guiseppe, Peano, Mandelbrot