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…

The more things change…

I had posted earlier about a recent commercial that, though arguing at one level that technology can fundamentally change education, seemed to stick to the standard-lecture (albeit in different and cooler modes of transmission). Just how little the discourse around...

Visualizing periodic tables (What not to do)

Sean Nash (of Nashworld) sent me a link to A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods of Management. This is a very cool looking representation developed by Ralph Lengler & Martin Eppler at the Institute of Corporate Communication at the University of Lugano,...

Exciting new possibility & an invitation

A few days ago we announced a new hybrid Ph.D. program in educational technology. It will be offered substantially online with some critical on-campus face to face factored in. You can find more details of the program by going to the website, or by reading the news...

Is the web making us stupid?

... or just narrow? I just discovered Britannica blog, a pretty lively virtual space for intelligent discussion. How I had not come across it earlier is a mystery - but again that is the beauty of the web. Anyway, there is an ongoing discussion there about how the web...

Why don’t students like school… In 30 mins!

One of the challenges faced by all instructors is ensuring that students actually read the textbook. This summer we came up with a innovative assignment to address this issue. The book in question was  Daniel Willingham's Why Don't Students Like School? A cognitive...

It Takes Two: A scientific romp using AI

It Takes Two: A scientific romp using AI

Dark 'n' Light is an e-zine that "explores science, nature, social justice and culture, through the arts and humanities." It is a labor of love by a small, dedicated team led by Susan Matthews, former legal and policy wonk, turned editor and podcaster. I came to know...

Untangling a decade of creativity scholarship

Untangling a decade of creativity scholarship

How do we capture a program of scholarship in an image? This is particularly complicated when the work is a tangled web of connections between research, teaching and practice, spread out over multiple publications, presentations and people. One attempt to do...

Happy New Year

For the past couple of years now, our family has been creating new year's greetings using stop-motion video. This year was no exception. Here it is (on Vimeo) http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=18164777 A very wonderful holidays and a very happy new year to all of...

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

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