Robyn Arianrhod

Robyn Arianrhod

Science writer and a mathematician

Robyn Arianrhod is a science writer and a mathematician affiliated with Monash University’s School of Mathematics, where she researches general relativity and history of science. She is the author of the critically acclaimed books "Einstein’s Heroes", "Seduced by Logic", and "Thomas Harriot".

Articles by: Robyn Arianrhod

A photograph of an arched stone bridge with a plaque

This 180-year-old graffiti scribble was actually an equation that changed the history of mathematics

By Robyn Arianrhod published

A photograph of the arched stone bridge that William Rowan Hamilton scratched his equation into.

Historic PORTRAIT OF TEACHER SMILING

'The beauty of symbolic equations is that it's much easier to … see a problem at a glance': How we moved from words and pictures to thinking symbolically

By Robyn Arianrhod published

"Even the +, −, =, and × signs we take for granted only came into widespread use in the 17th century. Which means that the earlier algebraists we know of … all had expressed their equations mostly in words or pictorial word images"