Oh — Pi Day again, Courtesy of Niles Johnson
Tag Archives: mathematics
The Number
1729
I remember once going to see him when he was ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen.
“No,” he replied, “it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways”
— G. H. Hardy
Euler Function on the Complex Plane
Yep, it is ALSO the first absolute Euler pseudoprime. Unique. Sui Generis.
Just like The Man Who Knew Infinity:
Srinivasa Ramanujan: Sui Generis
The Exceptional Twins
They varied in creed and circumstance.
They were the same in Temperament and interest.
They were exceptionally invariant in their passion.
They were the exceptional invariant twins.
You don’t chose your passion, your passion choses you — Jeff Bezos
Passion breeds talent — Stanislas Dehaene
Passion requires Temperament — David M. Keirsey
The Gift
He said softly, “I don’t see the point of us meeting.”
The conversation had essentially ended at that point. It was a complex point. An awkward social moment in time.
Very likely he wouldn’t accept a gift of million dollars.
It was a clopen topic to him; you see, it hadn’t anything to do with Mathematics proper.
Pi Day and oh, That Icon
Nerds, mathematicians, lovers of all things circular today celebrate Pi Day, the day that honors π, one of the world’s most mysterious inspiring infinite mathematical constants. Pi Day is celebrated on March 14 at 1:59:26 p.m., the date and time which corresponds to the first eight digits of π, or 3.1415926. π . It, March 14th is, also, the birth day of a German physicist. Those nerds like to think that they might figure out some of those mysteries, like that guy who’s birthday is March 14th, 1879.
By the way, if you don’t remember π can be approximated, but never represented by anything finite, by:
3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648233786783165271201909145648566923460348610454326648213393607260249141273724587006606315588174881520920962829254091715364367892590360011330530548820466521384146951941511609…
For it’s a transcendental number.
That Relational Thing
What is life?
That was the question he posed to himself.
No, he wasn’t asking the simple, vague, ill-posed, question: what those fuzzy, sloppy thinking Philosophers often try to talk about in volumes of words.
He was, in his mind, asking a precise question. A scientific question. For to answer this question, he had to ask the immediately deductible question: What is life, Not? Both questions are difficult to answer — precisely.
But he wanted to answer, What is life?, precisely, and he did give an answer: in his last book before he died.
But, there were critics of his work, although the vast majority are ignorant of his work.
An unnamed critic remarked: “The trouble with you, Rosen, is you’re always trying to answer questions that nobody wants to ASK!”