| Tribute to the QUEEN | #4
Belated Pi day wishes to you, dear reader. Very few days of remembrance can take place on two days: In this instance being 14th March (3/14) and 22nd July (22/7). Let’s not delve deeper into which day is appropriate but rather we’ll take notice of the importance of this irrational number. Pi is defined mathematically using a circle: Ratio of a circle’s circumference to its radius. As simple as it sounds, it is impossible to find the exact value of this ratio. So we rely on approximations like 3.14 or 22/7. Circles are everywhere around us and in spite of the different approximations, all circles are uniform. Such is the power of the exact (See the irony here?) science of mathematics.
This week, we will be covering interesting bits from the field of mathematics, The Queen of Sciences.
Fun Fundas.
1. Richard Feynman found trigonometric notations confusing and ambiguous. “To me, sinf looks s*i*n*f,” he said. He went on to use his own symbols cos he is Feynman!... The new ones are more complicated, huh?
Well, he later developed the Feynman diagrams, as simple as you like, a bunch of lines that represent one of those big quantum mechanics formulas for particle interactions which made the life of scientists way easier. Check out this interesting bit about how the Feynman diagrams saved space!
2. Math is often regarded as the language of all scientific literature. It makes more sense to write in symbolic form rather than using the terms everywhere, isn’t it? But what if there are some problems that can’t be expressed in mathematical terms?
One such instance is the problem of turbulence, which we humans intuitively understand. If you swirl the water in a bucket, how could you accurately describe the shape that you see? Turns out generations of scientists and mathematicians thought hard about this problem and concluded that in spite of taking in many factors, the approximation falls short. The answer, though, came from a singularly unexpected source: a painting.
Here’s an image of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night:
Look at the strokes in the night sky. This isn’t something that we can see with our naked eyes and Van Gogh’s interpretation is the real highlight of this. This comes pretty close to the actual shape of turbulence and can also be modeled well and thus is a rare instance of art influencing scientific research. You can find more information about this in this video:
3. Just came across an article laying down some important steps that Joe Biden is jotting down in his execution list before completing his first 100 days in office as the POTUS. It’s not just him but any high-profile job gets attention from the people and therefore it is quite natural that they expect something interesting from someone like the POTUS within his first 100 days in office. But the number hundred has been far trickier than the way we know it and research works suggest that the word hundred did not exactly mean the numeral ‘100’ as we use it today. Hundred in Old Norse didn’t even mean 100: It meant 120. Certain dialects of English, especially ones in northern England that were more influenced by Old Norse, used hundred, sometimes called a long hundred or a great hundred, for 120 in figuring goods and communities through the 19th century (“fresh fish sold by the long hundred”). But really happy that we use ‘hundred’ for the numeral 100 as we know today or else Gabriel Marquez would have found space for another three generations in his magnum opus, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Nah, it would have been even more enthralling.
4. The power of nothing :
On 21 September 1997, US Navy warship - USS Yorktown was performing training exercises off the coast of Cape Charles, Virginia when a crew member began troubleshooting a fuel valve that was physically closed, but according to the Smart Ship’s Standard Machinery Control System (SMCS) was open.
The technician ( mathematically disabled I might add ) tried to digitally calibrate and reset the fuel valve by entering a 0 value for one of the valve’s component properties into the SMCS Remote Database Manager (RDM). The RDM program then attempted to perform a division operation by the valve property; a divide-by-zero arithmetic exception was thrown, not caught by the program, and the RDM crashed. Since other Smart Ship systems were dependent on RDM availability across the LAN, the other components including ones controlling the motor and propulsion machinery began to fail in a domino-like sequence until the ship stopped dead in the water. The crew was able to troubleshoot and restart the ship’s systems only after two hours and forty-five minutes, and the Yorktown returned to base in Norfolk, Virginia.
Next time you make a silly mistake in maths, remember that at least you didn’t strand a warship…
5.The Vitruvian Man
Well, this diagram is not just another drawing made by Da Vinci but also has a mathematical significance. The diagram had elegantly tried to solve an old problem of mathematics, which is called squaring a circle.
“It is the challenge of constructing a square with the same area as a given circle by using only a finite number of steps with compass and straightedge”.
Da Vinci tried to take the human body as a reference to try constructing a circle and a square with the navel of the human body as the center. However, the task had been proven to be impossible due to the irrational nature of pi. But one can see how the mind of a true genius works by seeing how da Vinci had connected seemingly unrelated aspects to produce something magnificent.
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Here are a few snippets from the Tirutsava “Antargyan” General Quiz conducted by us.
Answer
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