Celebrating Euler’s birthday

by | Monday, April 15, 2013

Google has a new doodle out today (the 15th of April) to celebrate the 306th birth anniversary of Leonhard Euler, the Swiss mathematician and physicist. This prompted some reflection on his work (and some mathematical poetry)…

google-euler-doodle

At the bottom right of the doodle above you can see an equation, famously called Euler’s identity. It is usually represented as follows:

eulersidentity

It is famous because it combines into one simple equation the following elements:

  • The number 0, the additive identity
  • The number 1, the multiplicative identity
  • The number pi, the ration of a circle’s circumference to its diameter
  • The number e, the base of the natural logarithms
  • The number i, the imaginary number that equals the square root of -1 

Moreover, these constants are joined together by three basic arithmetic operations (addition, multiplication and exponentiation), each of which appears just once!

Can you pack more into one equation! It is no wonder that this equation has often been called the “gold standard for mathematical beauty!”

Anyway, Euler’s identity has appeared on this blog a couple of years ago – most specifically in a mathematical poem (titled The Imaginary i). Euler himself has appeared in these poems a couple of times as well. If you haven’t read these poems before, here they are again, in celebration of Euler’s birthday. Enjoy…

Topics related to this post: Art | Creativity | Fun | Mathematics | Personal | Puzzles | Worth Reading

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Neuroscience, downtime and creativity: New article

Neuroscience, downtime and creativity: New article

In this article, in our ongoing series on Rethinking technology & creativity in the 21st century, we interview Dr. Jung. Dr. Jung is a neuro-psychologist, brain imaging researcher, and a clinical professor of neurosurgery at the University of New...

New optical illusion: An oscillating visual paradox!

New optical illusion: An oscillating visual paradox!

A design for the word "illusions" inspired by a design by Scott Kim.  I have been obsessed with optical illusions for for a long time. This interest has played out in many ways: from the hundreds of ambigrams I have created to the new year’s videos we create as a...

Art is a lie… that tells the truth

Picasso famously said, "Art is a lie that tells the truth." This design below is my attempt to represent this quote - at least the first part of the quote. Of course, as most things go, it is not clear whether Picasso ever actually said these specific words. But...

New ambigram, Algebra

I have been thinking about the relationship between ambigrams and mathematics - instigated in no small part by an email conversation with Gaurav Bhatnagar. That inspired me to create ambigrams of words that are related to mathematics. There are a few ideas percolating...

Going back home

Amita Chudgar, friend and colleague, just sent me this really nice article in today's NYTimes, titled "India Calling" about the second generation of Indian Americans who are now going back to India. These are kids born and brought up in the US, whose parents had...

Manoranjan ka baap

The Indian Premier League, Twenty20 cricket championship was a great success. I had a chance to watch a few games (including the finals and semi-finals) when I was in india and it was a blast. This posting however is about an extremely creative commercial for the IPL...

TPACK & Creativity at Twente

I just finished a marathon session of presentations and discussions with the master's students in Curriculum Development and Educational Innovation at Twente University. It was wonderful to meet with them and discuss creativity, teaching, design, TPACK, among other...

Structured Improvisation and creativity

Structured Improvisation and creativity

Improv(e) Design by Punya Mishra In this article, in our ongoing series on Rethinking technology & creativity in the 21st century, we interview Dr. Keith Sawyer, Morgan Distinguished Professor in Educational Innovations at the University of North...

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *