Tap a card to flip it, and the math concept hiding inside that story appears. You'll start on a random one out of 100 stories, so use the arrows to keep browsing forward and back.
A math formula can sometimes feel like it just fell out of the sky, fully formed — but behind every one of them is the story of the person who first thought of it. As a young student, the German mathematician Gauss instantly solved the problem "add up every number from 1 to 100" by pairing off the ends, like 1 with 100 and 2 with 99. That clever insight became the root of today's arithmetic-sequence sum formula.
The ancient Greek Archimedes watched water overflow in his bathtub and realized that an object displaces exactly its own volume of water, and Euler solved a town's puzzle about crossing its bridges by simplifying the land into points and the bridges into lines. Mathematicians, just like us, were people who got curious, wandered around lost, and sometimes got lucky with a flash of insight.
Flip through the cards one by one, and meet ideas that came not from perfect genius answers, but from long stretches of curiosity.