Chandrasekhar died exactly 31 years ago today. At 19, on the boat from India to Cambridge in 1930, he worked out that a white dwarf above ~1.4 solar masses could not remain stable. Eddington publicly rejected the result. 53 years later, Chandrasekhar won the Nobel Prize for his

In 1964, John McCarthy, the creator of LISP, proposed sending a 5,000-pound AI-powered robot to search for life on Mars This machine would be able to: - Navigate obstacles autonomously - Support over-the-air software updates from Earth - Use computer vision to identify terrain

Galileo Galilei was born 462 years ago this Sunday.

It's amazing that a simple idea, such as the slope of a tangent line could have so many incredible consequences. Modern calculus was developed ~365 years ago.

François Viète discovered the first infinite product for π in the 16th century built from an infinite sequence of nested square roots of 2.

Andrew Wiles on the morning he discovered how to fix his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem