pi day
This post has nothing to do with tanzania. Sorry if you were led here under that assumption. Just some late night lucubrations of mine, and the results from omphaloskepsis sessions earlier in the day.
Today was pi day. Or, as my friend Patty says, at 1:59 it was pi day. 3.14159! Although my favourite real number is 4, pi, along with e, has a special place in my heart. That I have favourite numbers probably transcends rationality, and is likely why my preference curve for most favourite number DNE. Another highly favoured number of mine is i but that’s imaginary so don’t know if it counts. (3 bad maths puns ftw?) it really is quite incredible that the ancients were able to discover pi with so little. I mean, pi was more or less discovered and applied to Egyptian pyramids dating around 2600 nc, aristotle did work on pi around 200 bc, some Chinese guy did even more work on it (coming up with a better algorithm for generating decimal places/accuracy) in 200 ad, etc. Pi predates the bible, and is still widely applied today, unlike all parts of the holy books. Even today, after scientists have figured out the quadrillionth decimal place of pi (think it was s goose egg), its still a fun problem in computer science, to devise a program that not only computes pi to n digits, where n is sufficiently large, but also to do so in logarithmic time or faster. Whether or not this has any practical value remains to be seen, other than helping teach the budding programmer how to think, but its challenging and FUN.
You know what else is fun? Looking at and understanding elegant maths equations. And writing and reading elegant code. There’s a lot in common in math and computer science, to paraphrase dijikstra, the advancement of cs depends on good mathematicians, bad mathematicians should stay in the maths. Too often it seems we software engineer types get bogged down in the coding and don’t take notice of elegant code until we are far into debugging, if ever. Nor do we seem to have the time to step back and admire the maths behind what we do. Too bad modern day software engineering in the business world is all about meeting product ship deadlines, or the next tech demo, or just copying/pasting library function calls that someone else already wrote, cuz let’s face it, its more important to have a finished product for your client than it is for you to write up your own version of everything more complicated than stdio. But that’s a rant for another time. Fortunately, with side projects one can have fun doing programming without the extra stress and demands programming ifor work places. And no one minds but you if you decide to trash a few pages of code or take a hiatus on overall progress to work on writing elegant code. I wonder if its like that for professional mathematicians too. And yet, other than professor types, I don’t know what pure maths theory people go for employment.
Ill wrap this post with one of the most elegant maths formula around.
e^(i/pi)+1=0
Props if you know what that is. Even more props if you know how the proof goes. Further brownie points if you didn’t have to look on a wiki page, and if you j know more than 2 ways to do the proof. Finally, if you know what’s so elegant about it, then you probably need to be more social, or drink a toast to high quality maths classes.
