THE
MYTH
King Minos of Crete demanded of the Athenians seven youths and
maidens every nine years as an offering to the Minotaur, a bull-headed
monster that lived in the Cretan labyrinth that Daedalus built.
Theseus volunteered to try to defeat the monster. He successfully
navigated the labyrinth using a ball of string given him by
Ariadne and slew the Minotaur.
THE MATH
Guiseppe Peano (1858-1932)
The Italian mathematician and logician Peano described in 1890
a curve that could pass through every point of a square. The
idea was considered monstrous and nonintuitive until Mandelbrot
showed that it beautifully modeled nature such as watersheds
and trees, and was not pathological. Peano also introduced many
notations in symbolic logic, and set theory and presented the
axiom that zero is a number.
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