Jay Cummings: Okay, that’s a crazy integral. “I need help with this integral: the integral from negative one to one of one over x times the square root of one plus x over one minus x times the natural log of 2x squared plus 2x plus one, all divided by 2x squared minus 2x plus one, dx.” On November 11, 2013, a Stack Exchange user asked a question: Now Ron has solved 2,954 math problems in his decade on Stack Exchange, but he’s most famous for his answer to one integral in particular. Parshall: The Mathematics Stack Exchange website is like Yahoo Answers, if the people on Yahoo Answers had graduate-level STEM degrees. I was having so much fun with it that I just didn’t even keep track of how many hours I was dedicating to it. Gordon: I was working my full- time job, and then I was on Stack Exchange. Back in 2013, when our story takes place, he spent enough time on this online forum called Math Stack Exchange that it could have qualified as a full-time job. Other people are still doing Wordle.īut Ron Gordon, a patent agent and former physicist in Massachusetts, does hardcore calculus. They disappeared years ago but are still sparking debate and speculation. Today we’ve got an episode about a mysterious figure in the online math world. There’s a sort of a romance to the story, in a way.Īllison Parshall: I’m Allison Parshall, and you’re listening to Science, Quickly. Anthony Bonato: It’s a bit of an urban legend in mathematics.
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