A Little Less Chaos In The World

[filkertom]

Mathematician Edward Lorenz, father of chaos theory, discoverer of "strange attractors", and coiner of the term "butterfly effect", has passed away at the age of ninety.

What's your favorite mathematical law, constant or formula? I'm an e=mc² man myself, although π and i will always hold special places in my heart.

ETA: And how could I forget the tesseract?

Comments

[selenesue.livejournal.com]

He coined the term "butterfly effect"? I thought that derived from Ray Bradbury's story, A SOUND OF THUNDER.

I'm all about the Pi. Long ago, I baked a pie in the shape of Pi. I need to do that again some time.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

I just added a link up above. Bradbury wrote about the concept in 1952, but Lorenz coined the specific phrase in 1961.

[jcw-da-dmg.livejournal.com]

I was always fond of "e to the power of x = x". Don't remember shit about what it means, but I enjoyed the possibilities inherent in the phrase "e to the power of (e to the power of x)" - just so I could shout "Eex!" in class.

Yah - I was weird.

[selenesue.livejournal.com]

There are two kinds of people in the world. Weird and boring.

[veritropism.livejournal.com]

i is always a favorite of mine - irrational numbers are self-contradicting in ways that tickle my funny bone.

Writing the HTML to italicize it was amusing, too.

[stevemb.livejournal.com]

In pure mathematics, the Euler equation

e^(pi*i) + 1 = 0

is just such a weird but elegant connection.

[jss]

Augh! You beat me by seconds!

[jss]

Euler. e^iπ+1=0.

[mannoftalent.livejournal.com]

I don't know how this qualifies math-wise, but Heisenberg's "Uncertainty Principle" has always fascinated me.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Are you sure?

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

I'm rather partial to the Fourier series (and the related fourier transform), myself. I ran into it professionally in analysing the shapes of fusion targets back in my KMS days, and it's applications to image analysis were cool. And now that I've forgotten all the nitty-gritty of the mathematics, I appreciate it as being at the heart of musical sound.

[madmanotl.livejournal.com]

Interesting...

In high school, I had a classmate named Jon Lorenz who has some of his features. He got the other gold award in math at our high school graduation. I wonder if they were related somehow.

[momentrabbit.livejournal.com]

I have always been fond of Cole's Law, myself.

[wildcard9.livejournal.com]

What a load of cabbage!

[bald-ruminant.livejournal.com]

I'm a fan of the golden ratio, myself: φ = (1 + 5^½) / 2.

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

I thought it was defined by φ(φ-1)=1. But hey, I left formal math behind (mumble) years ago.

[bosswriter.livejournal.com]

On an irreverent take I will quote the words of the great Jimmy Buffet - "Math Suks" (from Beach House on the Moon album).

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

I myself am quite fond of the pseudo-math formula ∫e^x = f(uⁿ).

[knitmeapony.livejournal.com]

This is my new favorite mathematical article, if this counts: Paola Antonelli and Benoit Mandelbrot talk, awesome happens. http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2008/03/paola_antonelli_benoit_mandelb.php

I'll have to get back to this later

[capplor.livejournal.com]

But discovering one can crochet a hyperplane was pretty neat. All this math involved, and little old ladies were doing it a century ago.

[angharads-house.livejournal.com]

"caution, you are now entering n-dimensional vector space"

[avt-tor.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to surf the right side of Pareto's law (the rich get richer), which is closely related to Zipf's law, which among other things is the key to modern Internet marketing (sell everything; someone's going to want it eventually), which is relevant to how you make a living, in fact. (Cf. The Long Tail by Chris Anderson)

[armb.livejournal.com]

Since Euler's formula has already been mentioned, how about some
fractal cookies (http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/fractalcookies)?

[mathmuffin.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link! I will have to try this recipe.

[hitchkitty.livejournal.com]

With apologies to George Orwell:

One plus one equals two, because if that is given, all else follows.

[rook543.livejournal.com]

PI R Square

So I always know EXACTLY how much pizza I will be eating!

[jss]

No, pi r round. Cornbread r square.

[peachtales.livejournal.com]

And the beer brewed within said tesseract! :D

[jss]

It'll shoot you through the roof!

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

Fibonacci numbers for the win, baybee!

Also, x(x-1)=1 (the solution to which is the Golden Mean, and the basis of a great deal of apparent beauty to humans).

Finally, 1729. Why? Because it's the number in a famous story about Srinivasa Ramanujan:

[Mathematician G.H.] Hardy used to visit him, as he lay dying in hospital at Putney. It was on one of those visits that there happened the incident of the taxicab number. Hardy had gone out to Putney by taxi, as usual his chosen method of conveyance. He went into the room where Ramanujan was lying. Hardy, always inept about introducing a conversation, said, probably without a greeting, and certainly as his first remark: ‘I thought the number of my taxicab was 1729. It seemed to me rather a dull number.’ To which Ramanujan replied: ‘No, Hardy! No, Hardy! It is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

Nobody's mentioned my favorite, the Pervert Law
PV=nRT
(Although that's actually chemistry)

Purely mathematical, I'm a huge fan of Pythagorean Theorem
a^2+b^2=c^2
Since trig was the last math I took that I actually used.

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

Pi are not cardioid-shaped. Pi are round!

[hitchkitty.livejournal.com]

"No, son, no! Pie are round! Cornbread are square!"

[baphnedia.livejournal.com]

My favorite equation is:
e^(i pi)

[kengr]

iⁱ = e^-pi/2