Workshop season · 30 days
The Computer Age — 1948 to the Present
Roughly eighty years of abstract models meeting machines and new mathematics. Begin with Shannon's 1948 information theory, then visit Dijkstra's shortest paths, Conway's Game of Life, RSA, proofs by Wiles and Perelman, work by Mirzakhani, Tao, and Viazovska, and neural-network approximation theorems. The final day leaves one of the Millennium problems open: if an answer is quick to check, is it also quick to find?
Start anywhere. Every reading remains available after the season ends.
- Day 1
Claude Shannon
Explore this question →Season opens — 1948 Bell Labs, the bit becomes a measurable quantity (direct sequel to Season 3's Turing 1936)
- Day 2
Information Entropy
Explore this question →Information entropy — Shannon 1948 quantifies uncertainty and limits of communication
- Day 3
John von Neumann
Explore this question →1945 EDVAC draft — a document articulating stored-program ideas within a collaborative design history
- Day 4
Boolean Algebra
Explore this question →Boole 1854 resurrected in the computer a century later — electric circuits ≡ propositional logic
- Day 5
Computability
Explore this question →Equivalence of lambda calculus and Turing machines, plus the Church–Turing thesis about effective calculability
- Day 6
Turing's Life — Journey to the Apple
Explore this question →1912-1954 — reconnecting computability, cryptanalysis, early computing, and morphogenesis across one life
- Day 7
Edsger Dijkstra
Explore this question →1959 shortest-path paper — from a small routing problem to general algorithms and disciplined correctness
- Day 8
Computer-Assisted Proofs
Explore this question →1976 four-color theorem — computer-checked case analysis reopens the question of what makes a proof inspectable
- Day 9
John Horton Conway
Explore this question →1970 Game of Life — Turing-completeness emerges from four rules on a 2D grid; Martin Gardner's Sci.Am. column ignited the explosion
- Day 10
Benoît Mandelbrot
Explore this question →1967 coastline paper and the 1975 name fractal — bringing scattered self-similar structures into one view
- Day 11
Fractal
Explore this question →Fractals — modeling nature with non-integer dimension and patterns repeated across scales
- Day 12
P vs NP — Is Fast Verification the Same as Fast Search?
Explore this question →Cook 1971 · Karp 1972 — NP-completeness links many problems; a Millennium question returns on Day 30
- Day 13
Cryptography and Information
Explore this question →RSA 1977 — number theory becomes one pillar of public-key cryptography, alongside hashes, symmetric ciphers, protocols, and implementation
- Day 14
Modular Arithmetic
Explore this question →Modular arithmetic — Gauss's 1801 Disquisitiones results, applied 176 years later in RSA
- Day 15
Galois Theory
Explore this question →A 163-year chain: the legacy of 20-year-old Galois (1832) becoming the core tool of Wiles in 1995
- Day 16
Andrew Wiles
Explore this question →Announced 1993, repaired 1994, published 1995 — after years of private work, Wiles and Richard Taylor closed the gap
- Day 17
Fermat's Last Theorem — A 358-Year Margin
Explore this question →The 358-year margin of Fermat — the longest narrative in mathematics, from the 1637 margin in Diophantus to the 1995 modularity theorem
- Day 18
Elliptic Curves
Explore this question →Elliptic curves — one structure playing different roles in the Fermat proof and elliptic-curve cryptography
- Day 19
Grigori Perelman
Explore this question →Three arXiv preprints, 2002-2003 — resolving Poincaré via Ricci flow, then declining the Fields Medal and Clay prize
- Day 20
Poincaré Conjecture — Can Loops Identify a 3-D Space?
Explore this question →The Poincaré conjecture — Hamilton's Ricci flow, Perelman's new tools, and communal verification
- Day 21
Michael Atiyah
Explore this question →1963 Atiyah-Singer Index Theorem — a grand unification of analysis, topology, and differential geometry; Fields Medal 1966
- Day 22
Shing-Tung Yau
Explore this question →1976 proof of the Calabi conjecture → Calabi-Yau manifolds become the standard 6-dimensional compactification of string theory; Fields Medal 1982
- Day 23
Edward Witten
Explore this question →A physicist awarded the 1990 Fields Medal — TQFT and a two-way bridge between mathematics and quantum field theory
- Day 24
Topology
Explore this question →Topology — Poincaré and Brouwer's early-1900s seed maturing in Atiyah, Yau, Witten into the language of physics
- Day 25
Maryam Mirzakhani
Explore this question →2014, first woman to receive a Fields Medal — hyperbolic geometry and moduli-space dynamics; from 1994 and 1995 IMO golds to long-form research
- Day 26
Terence Tao
Explore this question →Fields Medal 2006 — collaboration across analysis, combinatorics, and PDE; Green–Tao finds arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions in the primes
- Day 27
Alain Connes
Explore this question →Noncommutative geometry (NCG) 1985 — redefining the nature of space via the noncommutativity of function algebras; a new frame toward the Riemann hypothesis
- Day 28
Maryna Viazovska
Explore this question →Sphere packing 2016 — Viazovska solved dimension 8 and joined collaborators for dimension 24; Fields Medal 2022
- Day 29
Universal Approximation Theorem
Explore this question →Cybenko, Hornik, and others, 1989 — suitable networks approximate continuous functions on compact domains; existence is not the same as trainability
- Day 30
P vs NP — Is Fast Verification the Same as Fast Search?
Explore this question →P vs NP — if an answer is quick to verify, is it quick to find? The question from Day 12 returns to the reader, still open