- 1971: The Oregon Trail (if50.substack.com)
In the midst of the cold but snowless Minnesota December of 1971, a student teacher named Don Rawitsch wheeled a bulky teletypewriter into his 8th grade history class. Students gathered around curiously as he plugged in power and phone cables, switched on the humming machine, and dialed the number on a rotary pad that would connect him to a $100,000 minicomputer fifty miles away. The students, Mr. Rawitsch said, were going to play a game.
- Sierpiński triangle (Wikipedia)
The Sierpiński triangle, also called the Sierpiński gasket or Sierpiński sieve, is a fractal with the overall shape of an equilateral triangle, subdivided recursively into smaller equilateral triangles. Originally constructed as a curve, this is one of the basic examples of self-similar sets—that is, it is a mathematically generated pattern that is reproducible at any magnification or reduction. It is named after the Polish mathematician Wacław Sierpiński, but appeared as a decorative pattern many centuries before the work of Sierpiński.
