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…

Technology Integration in Higher Education

Matt Koehler and I led a session on Technology Integration in Higher Education: Challenges & Opportunities for a day-long symposium titled: Colloquium on the Changing Professoriate. This is how our session was described in the program book/website: Technology has...

Of certainty & doubt

The NYTimes has a op-ed piece today by Max Blumenthal about an obscure letter Eisenhower wrote to "Robert Biggs, a terminally ill World War II veteran." Biggs was worried by ambiguity and uncertainty he seemed to observe in president Eisenhower. He wrote that he:...

Presentation/Workshop at Twente

I just completed a presentation at the symposium organized by the Department of Curriculum Design & Educational Innovation, University of Twente. Later this afternoon I will be conducting a workshop on creativity and the TPACK framework. The slides for both the...

TPACK Vanity (v. 2.0)

Back in 2006 Matt and I took a bunch of work that we had been doing in the area of technology integration for teaching and pulled it together into one broad theoretical framework and published it in TCRecord. The TPACK framework as it has come to be known has been...

Photo triplets

Christopher Bowhuis (a student in our summer on-campus MAET program) provided me a two minute tutorial on cloning myself, or anybody else for that matter. I had to go home and try it out with my kids (and a few of their friends who just happened to show up). Below are...

Keynote at MITE 2019, Sydney (video)

Keynote at MITE 2019, Sydney (video)

I was recently invited to present a Keynote at the Mobile Technology in Teacher Education (MITE) 2019 Conference hosted by The University of Technology, Sydney. This was the fifth edition of the conference, and as it turns out, I had given a keynote at the first...

The blame (& praise) game continues

I have shared earlier a design for a reflection ambigram for the two words "praise" and "blame" - where one word becomes another when reflected in a mirror. In fact the design has been printed in 3D. As it turns out this was a design that I had made many years ago -...

Happy Valentine’s Day (new ambigram)

  A quick and dirty ambigram for Valentine's day, scribbled on the back of an envelope (literally), and photographed using my phone! Have a great day everybody 🙂

The mathematical “i”

The mathematical “i”

I guess 'tis the season of Math-Po's! Sue VanHattum, whose challenge started all this, commented on my recent Math-Po (Math-Po (Mathematical Poetry): Goldbach’s Conjecture) by providing an example of her own writing, a poem titled Imaginary Numbers Do the Trick. That...

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

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