March 14 was π day! This is because 3.14 is an approximation of this famous number and that day is written 3/14 in the USA. I know I am coming to the party two weeks after the fact, but I didn’t want to let this pass.
I am a lover of mathematics, both the elegant and the complex.
I love the collapse of the wave equation, in which an infinite number of future possibilities collapse into a single event that comes to pass. It relies on the square root of negative one (-1) to get its job done and that square root is an imaginary number! That’s what I call complex! Actually, so do many others because in math a complex number is one that includes both a real and imaginary number.
Then there is the elegance of π (pi). People long ago knew there was a fixed ratio of circumference to diameter. In 1761 it was proved that Pi is mathematically irrational, meaning it can’t be written as a ratio of two integers (integers are whole numbers and their negative counterparts: …-3,-2,-1,0,1,2,3…). And so the digits of π never end or repeat in any known way. Here’s the first 100:
3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679
What could be more elegant than a circle?
What are your loves and how will you find time to appreciate one of them in the week ahead?
“When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding: teaching. I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools.” – Angela Duckworth
