by David Brooks | Jun 10, 2025 | Blog, Newsletter
Just like you and me, Dean Rubine admits that he sometimes wastes time online. “When I’m not doing my real job, I like to watch math on YouTube,” he said. OK, maybe he’s not just like you and me. And as we’ll see, it’s not always a waste of time. Rubine is a computer...
by David Brooks | Nov 18, 2022 | Blog, Newsletter
Back in 2013, Yitang “Tom” Zhang, a calculus lecturer at UNH, submitted a paper to the Annals of Mathematics about a problem known as the twin-prime conjecture. Within a week, his breakthrough had drawn worldwide attention from research mathematicians, Harvard had...
by David Brooks | Dec 31, 2018 | Blog, Newsletter
The upcoming year may or may not turn out to be a good one but one thing is certain: It will see an uptick in New Hampshire’s geek status. How do I know? Because my quest to publicly acknowledge the Granite State as the birthplace of the BASIC computer language has...
by David Brooks | Sep 19, 2017 | Blog, Newsletter
As promised last week, I’m hosting a talk next Tuesday (Sept. 26) after a showing of “Counting From Infinity” – here’s my column from the Monitor discussing it: No matter how many bar arguments you’ve been involved in, I’ll bet you’ve...
by David Brooks | Sep 13, 2017 | Newsletter
Yitang “Tom” Zhang used to be a calculus teacher at UNH and apparently a good one – students praised him on RateMyProfessors.com, unusual for a mathematician with a strong accent – when he published a breakthrough in the twin-prime problem that made him...
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