board77

*rolls up sleeves*

Right.

Gimli must be very successful because he's climbed the greasy Pole. :p

PS:

I thought you said he was going to be a Pole Vaulter?

PS: &

Those explanations are very nice.... but how do you know that equation is true? Aren't some of the numbers endless, and others irrational... how can you actually prove and show that e^(i pi) + 1 = 0 ?

How do you know this relationship between these numbers is what Euler says it is? Is there a way to work it out by hand, since my daughter's calculator goes into conniption fits at the thought of it?

Or is this just one of those mathematical intuition things. You see it and KNOW it to be profound and true?

My son is up now. I'll see if he 'gets' it. EDIT: He doesn't.

I'll ask my mathematician friend when we go to the cinema tomorrow. (I thought it funny the title of the movie is numeric: 2046. The next premiere is announced as 5x2.)

Lidless,

Thanks for finding that great explanation.

Wampuscat.

Hofstadter later published Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern, which you might also like. It's from the days when Scientific American was interesting and includes some essays not published there.

I think Halplm pasted in the proof of e^i pi + 1 = 0 in the December montly thread in Movies on Torc.

I'm too lazy to go look for it. Maybe he can paste it again here.

Jn

Never mind, Jn, Google can find anything if you give it the right search terms. Here's a proof of that equation:

http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/53865.html


Now, I don't have the math background to follow all that, but I suppose it's been proved to mathematicians' satisfaction over the past couple of hundred years. I'll take their word for it. Trying to follow those equations gives me an instant headache!

I'll show it to my kids and see if they are suitably awed.

Thanks, Maria!

Jn

Thanks, Idylle. I'll check that out.

That equation always reminds me of this Far Side:



"No doubt about it, Ellinton - we’ve mathematically expressed the purpose of the universe. Gad, how I love the thrill of scientific discovery!"

LOL! My daughter just came to me in a frenzy to show me how that proof works. She was all excited and described it as "terrifying". I had to disappoint her and say that I didn't want to re-learn maths that I forgot 25 years ago, and that I'd just take her word for it.

But she was really, REALLY excited about it. Maybe she WILL do well at that engineering college she's going to next fall.

IdylleSeethes wrote:

The Indiana legislature has been distracted for 100 years by a discussion of daylight saving time. Once they have resolved this, I am confident they will return to the discussion of pi.

Xerox beat them to it. One of their programming manuals explained the use of constants such as PI = 3.14159265 in writing software in these terms:

Some genius at Xerox wrote:

The primary purpose of the Data statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable Pi can be given that value with a Data statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change.

MariaHobbit wrote:

Maybe she WILL do well at that engineering college she's going to next fall.

You sound like my father before I went away to college. Four years later I graduated with honors in academics and research.

I do have at least a mild form of this. A friend of mine asked me about this last week. I was fasinated by the fact that everyone didn't see letters as having colors like I do. I always hated Math. Numbers to me are all black. I always want to add intimidating to my description of how I see numbers. that may be why I never enjoyed it.

There are also have some fragrences that make me taste certain things but these are fairly rare.



(And I promise my thread in Manwe was not copying this one here which I didn't know existed. )

I didn't know this one was here either, REL.

As I said in Manwe, I have some of these traits, I think, to a small degree. Smells have colors, letters have tastes and personalities, numbers have gender (if that counts), etc. I don't know if we decided that smells and tastes counted. (I had said that I associate certain tastes with odd things. When I eat carrots, I can often taste an old, Victorian house. I have certain lipsticks that taste like crap--literally. Now, of course, I've never tasted either of those things, but I just know that they would taste just like that. <shrug> That one can probably be chalked up to chemistry.)

I love patterns and find them everywhere. I did well in math, though it was never my main thing. (Is Maths the way you say it in Europe?) Symmetry is quite important to me, realizing, though, that there is a certain symmetry in asymmetry.

OTOH, I am also one of those artsy people. I "get" music, art, poems, writing, etc., and I do all of those things as well.

Music. Hmmm, music is such a big part of my life, but do I view it any differently than one would think? (BTW, Laureanna, that is absolutely fascinating!) I suppose I do see moving shapes with colors upon occasion. I analyze it more than feel it, usually. I, too, am dissecting it, listening for the different instruments, figuring out which one is playing what part, etc.

Lidless, while I don't have a religious experience when I think about that equation, I do think it's really, really cool and understand how someone who really loved math would find it sublime. I love it when things like that just work out, when you find those underlying patterns and connections between things. (Those types of things bring to mind God more than anything else for me.)


Lali