Posts Tagged ‘Euler’
“Nothing is more memorable than truth beautifully told”*…
If physicists and mathematicians can’t be rock stars, they can at least have rock star logos. Dr. Prateek Lala, a physician and amateur calligrapher from Toronto has obliged with 50 nifty “scientific typographics” of important cosmologists and scientists through the ages.
Inspired by the “type biographies” of Indian graphic designer Kapil Bhagat, Lala designed his logos to make the lives and discoveries of various scientists more engaging and more immediately relatable to students.
Dr. Lala’s work was for a poster that was published in the latest issue of Inside The Perimeter, the official magazine of Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. One can subscribe to the magazine by email for free here.
Meantime, one can read the backstory, and see many more of Dr. L’s lyrical logos at CoDesign.
* Rick Julian
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As we ponder personal branding, we might send dynamic birthday greetings to Daniel Bernoulli; he was born on this date in 1700. One of the several prominent mathematicians and physicists in the Swiss Bernoulli family, Daniel is best remembered for or his applications of mathematics to mechanics, especially fluid mechanics, and for his pioneering work in probability and statistics. His name is commemorated in the Bernoulli principle, a particular example of the conservation of energy, which describes the mathematics of the mechanism underlying the operation of two important technologies of the 20th century: the carburetor and the airplane wing.
A contemporary and close friend of Leonhard Euler (see above), Bernoulli was the son of Johann Bernoulli (one of the early developers of calculus), nephew of Jakob Bernoulli (who was the first to discover the theory of probability), and the brother of Johann II (an expert on magnetism and the propagation of light). Daniel is said to have had a bad relationship with his father: when they tied for first place in a scientific contest at the University of Paris, Johann, unable to bear the “shame” of being compared as Daniel’s equal, banned Daniel from his house. Johann Bernoulli then plagiarized some key ideas from Daniel’s book Hydrodynamica in his own book Hydraulica, which he backdated to before Hydrodynamica. Despite Daniel’s attempts at reconciliation, his father carried the grudge until his death.
No reservation? No problem!…
Jeff Dekofsky explains Hilbert’s paradox of the Grand Hotel, a thought experiment proposed in the 1920s by German mathematician David Hilbert to illustrate some surprising properties of infinite sets, in this TED-Ed animated lecture…
email readers click here for video
As a special bonus, another amusing video (via Kottke)– an explanation of why it is that the sum of all positive integers (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + …) = -1/12… Euler actually proved this result in 1735, but the result was only made rigorous later; and now physicists have been seeing this result actually show up in nature. (Spoiler alert: the answer turns on what one means by “sum” mathematically…)
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As we pray for more fingers and toes, we might spare a thought for Harald August Bohr; he died on this date in 1951. While materially less well-known than his brother Niels, Harald was a formidable mathematician (founder of the field of almost periodic functions), a gifted athlete (an accomplished footballer who won a silver medal at the 1908 Summer Olympics as a member of Denmark’s team), an inspirational teacher (the annual award for outstanding teaching at the University of Copenhagen is called “the Harald” in his honor), and an out-spoken critic of the anti-Semitic policies that took root in the German mathematical establishment in the 1930s.
Spiraling into control…
The Fibonacci spiral (source)
As we remark that math really is beautiful, we might send elegantly parsimonious birthday greetings to one of Fibonacci’s spiritual descendants, a father of Pure Mathematics, Leonhard Euler; he was born on this date in 1707. While crafting “the most remarkable formula in mathematics,” Euler made foundational contributions to number theory, graph theory, mathematical logic, and applied math; he originated many commonly-used figures of mathematical notation, and invented the concept of the “mathematical function.” And he was no slouch in physics either, making renowned contributions in work in mechanics, fluid dynamics, optics, and astronomy.
It’s all about the ink…
Called “the most remarkable formula in mathematics” by Richard Feynman, Leonhard Euler‘s Identity, as the equation in the tattoo is known, was named in a reader poll conducted by Mathematical Intelligencer as the most beautiful theorem in mathematics. Another reader poll conducted by Physics World named it the “greatest equation ever.” *
One can find other mathematical and scientific tattoos here… and if one wishes to design one’s own, well…
… just click here.
As we steel ourselves for the needle, we might recall that on this date in 1947, George C. Marshall, a former general serving as Secretary of State, gave the speech at Harvard that laid the foundation for what became known as The Marshall Plan– the program under which the U.S. provided around $12 Billion (a fraction of the sum that the Federal government is “investing” in G.M, but real money in those days… ) to help finance the economic recovery of Europe in the wake of World War II.
Oh, and lest we forget, June is Accordion Appreciation Month.
-The number 0.
-The number 1.
-The number π, which is ubiquitous in trigonometry, geometry of Euclidean space, and mathematical analysis (π ≈ 3.14159).
-The number e, the base of natural logarithms, which also occurs widely in mathematical analysis (e ≈ 2.71828).
-The number i, imaginary unit of the complex numbers, which contain the roots of all nonconstant polynomials and lead to deeper insight into many operators, such as integration.
And the equation is “balanced,” with zero on one side.
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