13 Chalkboard Moments You’ll Never See Again
Chalkboard moments in history capture the fleeting brilliance of intellectual giants, where groundbreaking theories, equations, and discoveries were born from nothing more than chalk, blackboards, and the minds that dared to change the world.
- Alyana Aguja
- 4 min read
Over the years, some of the most significant scientific, mathematical, and philosophical advances were written, drawn, or drafted on simple chalkboards, making them icons of brilliance. These instances, too often forgotten over time as boards were erased between each lecture, are the impermanence of knowledge in its raw, inexact state. From Einstein’s theory of relativity to Turing’s algorithms, these chalkboard sessions were the sites where revolutionary concepts were born to change the world forever.
1. Albert Einstein Deriving E=mc² at Princeton
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Einstein would famously cover chalkboards at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study with his investigations of relativity in the 1930s. One time, after an open lecture, a chalkboard with an early version of E=mc² was erased by accident by a janitor. Few of his original chalkboards have survived and are today cared for essentially as relics.
2. Richard Feynman’s “Physics Lectures” at Caltech
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In the early 1960s, physicist Richard Feynman gave a legendary undergraduate lecture series, covering boards with gorgeous, intuitive diagrams and equations. Feynman’s sarcastic voice and energetic chalkboard action made difficult quantum mechanics come alive as living art. Those boards are lost, but the Feynman Lectures books endure.
3. Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Proof Sketches
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In private lectures during the late 1930s, Gödel laboriously guided top students through his incompleteness theorems, using a blackboard to illustrate mind-bending logical circles. It was torturous, nearly agonizing, but to watch it was said to be “seeing lightning develop in slow motion.” No cameras were permitted, and all chalkboards were cleaned routinely.
4. Stephen Hawking’s Time Travel Equations at Cambridge
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In the 1980s, Hawking would fill up entire blackboards in the University of Cambridge with scribbled, sprawling equations delving into black holes and theoretical time travel. His grad students once fought to predict which portion of the equations would appear in A Brief History of Time. Most were erased at the session’s end, lost to eternity.
5. John Nash’s Game Theory Diagrams at Princeton
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In the early 1950s, John Nash relentlessly scribbled radical concepts in game theory on public chalkboards across Princeton. His odd, isolated figures in chalk were the legend of the campus. Few photos or duplicates survived from that era; his epiphanies in his head were wiped out by regular cleaning.
6. Katherine Johnson’s Orbital Calculations at NASA
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Before computers took over at NASA, mathematician Katherine Johnson worked out orbital trajectories by hand, covering blackboards with careful, critical numbers. Her chalk marks enabled John Glenn to be launched safely into space. Unfortunately, most of her working boards were erased after each important session.
7. Alan Turing’s Decryption Algorithms at Bletchley Park
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At Britain’s clandestine WWII Bletchley Park, Turing made preliminary designs for breaking Nazi Enigma codes in chalk on blackboards. Security regulations required boards to be erased instantly after the discussions were over. There are no surviving blackboard records in Turing’s hand—only second-hand accounts.
8. Marie Curie’s Radiation Formulas at the Sorbonne
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Marie Curie used to give lectures regularly at the Sorbonne in the early 1900s, scribbling chemical breakdown equations for her amazed students. She treated her chalk as precisely as she treated radioactive specimens. None of her work on the blackboard survived, partially due to fears that it might literally be radioactive!
9. Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle Notes in Copenhagen
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In heated 1927 debates with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, Heisenberg sketched the original version of the Uncertainty Principle onto a blackboard. Subsequent histories report the board remained unscathed for several days, as if consecrated, before it was eventually wiped away. No photo evidence exists—only memory and myth.
10. J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Atomic Bomb Lectures at Los Alamos
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Oppenheimer would give crucial briefings at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, usually sketching nuclear fission reactions in chalk. His blackboards held the most top-secret information on the planet at the time. Each chalkboard was promptly wiped clean under armed guard to avoid leaks.
11. Carl Sagan’s “Cosmic Calendar” Diagrams at Cornell
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During his freshman astronomy lectures at Cornell, Carl Sagan explained the lengthy timeline of the universe condensed to a “cosmic year” drawn on a blackboard. His students would stand agog while he scribbled dinosaurs and Homo sapiens appearing in the final seconds. Sagan’s live boards vanished, but their essence lingers in Cosmos.
12. Emmy Noether’s Symmetry Theorems at Göttingen
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In pre-WWI Germany, Emmy Noether formulated seminal mathematical ideas regarding symmetry and conservation laws, writing wild, convoluted proofs on classroom blackboards. Her dynamic, expressive teaching style left the boards nearly unreadable to outsiders. No photographs exist, and students barely managed to keep pace with notes.
13. Henri Poincaré’s Topology Doodles at the Sorbonne
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Poincaré, the father of contemporary topology, delighted in scribbling curved loops, surfaces, and bizarre shapes on chalkboards during his lectures. Colleagues recalled him stopping mid-sentence to cover the board with cryptic, sprawling diagrams. None of those chalkboards survived, but they contributed to the development of contemporary mathematics.
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