The Museion Society, named after Musaeum, the Hall of the Muses in ancient Alexandria, recognizes our friends who support MSRI with gifts of $5,040 or more. Museion members enjoy all the benefits of the Archimedes Society, and they are invited to three exclusive dinners with lectures in the Bay Area and in New York.
Archimedes Society
$55+ Fibonacci
55 is a Fibonacci
Number. Leonardo Pisano Bigollo (1170–1250), known as Fibonacci, was an Italian
mathematician, who helped spread the Hindu-Arabic numeral system in Europe. In
the Fibonacci sequence of numbers, each number is the sum of the previous two
numbers.
$257+ Fermat
257 is a Fermat number
and is equal to 2 to the 2 to the 3 plus 1. Pierre de Fermat (1601–1665) was a
French lawyer and an amateur mathematician who is best known for his Last
Theorem which remained unproven for 358 years and stimulated the development of
algebraic number theory.
$882+ Noether
882 are the last
three digits of the birth year of Emmy Noether (1882–1935), whose paper on
Idealtheorie in Ringbereichen ushered in the beginning of the field of Abstract
Algebra which became a dominant theme of 20th Century mathematics and
flourishes into the 21st.
$1,729+ Ramanujan
1,729 is the number
of Hardy’s taxicab, which, Ramanujan
concluded, is the smallest number
expressible as the sum of two cubes in
two different ways. Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920) was an Indian mathematician
who, with almost no formal training in mathematics, made extraordinary
contributions to mathematical analysis and number theory.
Museion Society
$5,040+ Plato
Plato (c. 428–c. 348
BCE) suggested that a suitable number of
citizens for the ideal city would be
that number which contained the most numerous and most consecutive
subdivisions. He decided on 5,040, a number with 59 divisors (apart from
itself). 5,040 citizens can be divided by any number from 1 to 10.
$10,000+ Hypatia
Hypatia of
Alexandria (c. 370–415) is considered the first woman to make a substantial
contribution to the development of mathematics; she assisted her father Theon
of Alexandria in writing his eleven part commentary on Ptolemy's Almagest.
$25,000+ Euclid
Euclid (c. 325–c. 265 BCE) was a Greek mathematician best known for his treatise on geometry, The Elements, which influenced the development of Western mathematics for more than 2,000 years.