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| Sara Santos |
It's an excellent bet that few of the buskers encountered on the streets of Europe's major cities have Ph.D.s in mathematics. But on this day in London, the woman doing card tricks for passersby -- coaxing a teenage girl to encode her birthday into binary, for example, and then quickly doing the reverse conversion to announce the date -- was expatriate Portuguese mathematician Sara Santos, who in her daytime job coordinates the Royal Institution of Great Britain's Secondary Mathematics Masterclass Programme for talented 12- to 14-year-olds.
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| Fractals: Scientific American |
Most of us take it for granted that math works—that scientists can devise formulas to describe subatomic events or that engineers can calculate paths for spacecraft. We accept the view, initially espoused by Galileo, that mathematics is the language of science and expect that its grammar explains experimental results and even predicts novel phenomena. The power of mathematics, though, is nothing short of astonishing.
Scientific Magazine: A Mathematician Takes to the Streets
Scientific American: Why Math Works
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