“In most sciences, one generation tears down what another has built, and what one has established another undoes. In mathematics alone, each generation adds a new story to the old structure.”
—Hermann Hankel
In my old snail-mail Mathematical Adventures newsletter, I used to squeeze bits and snippets into the margins. Quotations, historical tidbits, and small puzzles tangentially related to the main story.
These marginal notes were not simply decoration. Rather, they served the same purpose as the small bumps on a Lego brick, connections on which to build a greater understanding of the world of math.
Thinking about how other people have explored the world of mathematics in the past can offer us new ways of looking at, the things we’re learning today.
Besides, math history is just plain interesting. After all, it’s the story of people just like us, people who wondered, fought, loved, grieved, and lived rich lives—and who played around with math puzzles that we can still enjoy today.
The internet flows like water, however, adjusting content to fit your screen size, which means it doesn’t really have margins to fill. But that’s fine, because it lets me expand the tidbits into a post of their own and include links for further research. You can enjoy my bits and bobs, and then click through to explore on your own.
So let’s turn the clock back a couple thousand years and see what we can find…
Irish mathematician William R. Hamilton was struggling with a tough math problem in October, 1843. It had him stumped. Then on the 16th, as he walked along Dublin’s Royal Canal with his wife, inspiration struck. 
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