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Time: “She knows action on climate change won’t happen instantly, but she’s prepared to dedicate years to this cause, even if life in the public eye has its drawbacks.

“When I grow up, I want to be able to look back and say that I did everything I could,” she says. “I think that more people should feel like that.””

Could you imagine?

You’re Charlotte Scott. You’re determined to get your math degree as a woman in the late 1800s. You fight sexism and condescension every day and somehow wrangle your way into a special and prestigious exam. And then this happens:

“In 1880, Scott obtained special permission to take the Cambridge Mathematical TriposExam, as women were not normally allowed to sit for the exam. She came eighth on the Tripos of all students taking them, but due to her sex, the title of “eighth wrangler,” a high honour, went officially to a male student.[1]

At the ceremony, however, after the seventh wrangler had been announced, all the students in the audience shouted her name.

***

The man read out the names and when he came to ‘eighth,’ before he could say the name, all the undergraduates called out ‘Scott of Girton,’ and cheered tremendously, shouting her name over and over again with tremendous cheers and waving of hats.

— contemporary report, “Charlotte Angas Scott (1858–1931)” in Women of Mathematics: A Biobibliographic Sourcebook[1]

***

Because she could not attend the award ceremony, Scott celebrated her accomplishment at Girton College where there were cheers and clapping at dinner, a special evening ceremony where the students sang “See the Conquering Hero Comes”, received an ode written by a staff member, and was crowned with laurels.[1]

After this incident women were allowed to formally take the exam and their exam scores listed, although separately from the men’s and thus not included in the rankings. Women obtaining the necessary score also received a special certificate instead of the BA degree with honours. In 1922, James Harkness remarked that Scott’s achievement marked “the turning point in England from the theoretical feminism of Mill and others to the practical education and political advances of the present time”.[1]“ — wikipedia

😭♥️

Later on, Charlotte became one of the core mathematics faculty of Bryn Mawr College, and also is seen as one of the key figures in the transition to abstract mathematical proofs, as well as the first female member of the New York Mathematical society, later known as the AMS. What a cool lady.

Moving blog! @chaoticaldynamics

Hi everyone! I’m moving my blog to @chaoticaldynamics

Long story, but tumblr is a chaotic website. Follow me there if you are interested!

Alejandro Guijarro photographs the chalkboards of some of the brightest minds in quantum physics for his continuing series Momentum. He went to research facilities like CERN and many of the top universities in the world to find them.

The topologist’s sine curve.

Limts: f(x)=sin(1/x) is a rare example of a function with a non-existent one-sided limit. More technically, f(x)=sin(1/x) is defined for all numbers greater than zero, yet the limit as x approaches zero from the right of f(x)=sin(1/x) does not exist. This can be reasoned by considering the value of f at x-values near zero. Informally, f(near zero) could be 1 f(just a bit closer to zero) could be -1 so f(numbers near zero) does not seem to settle on a single y-value.

Continuity: Note that f is continuous for all numbers greater than zero but not continuous at x=0 since f is undefined there. Even if we were to “fill in the bad point” and let f(0)=0, the function would still not be continuous at zero! (note this is the natural choice as sin(0)=0). We can see that the adjusted f is still not continuous at zero since the sequence x_n=1/(pi/2+npi) converges but f(1/x_n) is the sequence (-1)^n which does not converge. This is similar to the argument above. In other words, closing in on x=0, we can keep finding x values such that f(x)=-1 and f(x)=1.

Topology: In topology, the topologist’s sine curve is a classic example of a space that is connected but not path connected. This space is formed in R^2 by taking the graph of f(x)=sin(1/x) together with its limit points (the line segment on the y-axis [-1,1], the red line on the second image). The graph of f is connected to this line segment as f and the segment cannot be sepearted by an open disc (no matter how small). This can be informally reasoned by the zooming illustration in the second image. But the space is not path connected by the sequence argument above (there is no path to the point (0,0)).

Image credits: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/TopologistsSineCurve.html and https://simomaths.wordpress.com/2013/03/10/topology-locally-connected-and-locally-path-connected-spaces/

The Universe's Brightest Lights Have Some Dark Origins

Did you know some of the brightest sources of light in the sky come from black holes in the centers of galaxies? It sounds a little contradictory, but it’s true! They may not look bright to our eyes, but satellites have spotted oodles of them across the universe. 

One of those satellites is our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Fermi has found thousands of these kinds of galaxies in the 10 years it’s been operating, and there are many more out there!

Black holes are regions of space that have so much gravity that nothing - not light, not particles, nada - can escape. Most galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers - these are black holes that are hundreds of thousands to billions of times the mass of our sun - but active galactic nuclei (also called “AGN” for short, or just “active galaxies”) are surrounded by gas and dust that’s constantly falling into the black hole. As the gas and dust fall, they start to spin and form a disk. Because of the friction and other forces at work, the spinning disk starts to heat up.

The disk’s heat gets emitted as light - but not just wavelengths of it that we can see with our eyes. We see light from AGN across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from the more familiar radio and optical waves through to the more exotic X-rays and gamma rays, which we need special telescopes to spot.

About one in 10 AGN beam out jets of energetic particles, which are traveling almost as fast as light. Scientists are studying these jets to try to understand how black holes - which pull everything in with their huge amounts of gravity - somehow provide the energy needed to propel the particles in these jets.

Many of the ways we tell one type of AGN from another depend on how they’re oriented from our point of view. With radio galaxies, for example, we see the jets from the side as they’re beaming vast amounts of energy into space. Then there’s blazars, which are a type of AGN that have a jet that is pointed almost directly at Earth, which makes the AGN particularly bright.  

Our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has been searching the sky for gamma ray sources for 10 years. More than half (57%) of the sources it has found have been blazars. Gamma rays are useful because they can tell us a lot about how particles accelerate and how they interact with their environment.

So why do we care about AGN? We know that some AGN formed early in the history of the universe. With their enormous power, they almost certainly affected how the universe changed over time. By discovering how AGN work, we can understand better how the universe came to be the way it is now.

Fermi’s helped us learn a lot about the gamma-ray universe over the last 10 years. Learn more about Fermi and how we’re celebrating its accomplishments all year.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

10.04.19 // went to a cafe this evening to get some vegan coffee cake before my first final but they were all out :( rip

NASA has released new images of Jupiter, taken by the Juno Spacecraft.

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Missing the maths part :'(