Math Is Cool, Part 2

April last year, I blogged about math coolness I encountered while poking around the TopCoder member profiles...

Yes, I'm a math geek... who knew!?

In doubt that math is cool?! What would Halo 3 be without math... think on that one! So, maybe it's not math itself, but what can be done with math that's cool.... but then, aren't we just quibbling over semantics?

In fact, I was a fairly marginal math student all the way through school and much of the way through college; always a year behind the curve it seemed. But the August 1985 cover of BYTE magazine changed all that. [No luck finding an actual image of the cover online, but I did find this great link!] My discovery of Fractal mathematics convinced me that not only is math cool, but that I was in a unique point in history to be able to combine my love for computers with the power of math.

Anyway, I've been reading a series of books from SciAm Book Club (see note above) covering the history, math, and personalities surrounding Pi, e, i, Phi, and zero. Did you know that Pi, e, and i are all directly related to each other?! (While reading about Pi, I discovered why the Riemann Zeta function series contains primes... more coolness.)

So, I'm reading about Phi, now.

Did you know that Phi can be found in the five-pointed star? Measure the distance between two adjacent points, and divide that into the length of one of the long strokes... 1.618... Phi. [From my hand-drawn star, I get ratios between 1.42 and 1.59... maybe you can get a closer result.]

More later...

Math Is Cool

In his profile for the 2006 TopCoder Open, in response to the question, "If you could be the keeper to the answer of one of the most unknown questions in the world, what would be the question?" Reid Barton wrote: "The Riemann Hypothesis. Then I’d sell out, in exchange for eternal fame and fortune."

Thanks to Google and Wikipedia, I found: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_hypothesis.

Which, in turn, lead to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_zeta_function, where two things have always seemed too cool to me (in a totally math-geek sorta way):





1) That a series like this can result in the value pi; somewhat like a mystical incantation, where each term leads closer to unleashing the magic.

And, even cooler:





2) That the equation is directly and provably related to primes; written in long form:

To smarter folks than I, these relationships may seem intuitively obvious. But, to me they offer a window on relationships in mathematics that seem nearly magical. To me, that's cool.