Most beautiful equation

Posted Oct 29, 2015 4:21 UTC (Thu) by brugolsky (guest, #28)
Parent article: What's new in TeX, part 2

Quibble: the "most beautiful equation" is better written as e^{i\pi} + 1 = 0, as that presentation highlights how the various operations and their unit elements delicately combine and relate elementary arithmetic, algebra, geometry, & calculus.

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Most beautiful equation

Posted Oct 29, 2015 7:04 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link] (2 responses)

Should I assume you like this form better because it includes 0 (zero)?

Zero was such an abstract concept that the Romans didn't have a clue. (How do I write 0 in Roman numerals?)

Thanks to 9th Century India (by way of Persia and Arabia) did 0 find its way to Europe. (Source: Wikipedia [which also states the profound importance of 0 in mathematics].)

Most beautiful equation

Posted Oct 29, 2015 9:50 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

Off-topic, maybe, but it's amusing to note that Europeans were using abacuses -- which implicitly use place notation, and zero -- for centuries before they began transcribing the results that way.

Most beautiful equation

Posted Oct 29, 2015 11:02 UTC (Thu) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

You are confusing zero the digit with zero the number. Zero the number was know by ancient Egyptians, alongside negative numbers. I do not know why people are relating invention of positional notation with the invention of the zero, since before positional notations there were no true digits, only numbers.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0_%28number%29#Egypt

Most beautiful equation

Posted Oct 29, 2015 11:08 UTC (Thu) by kingdon (guest, #4526) [Link] (6 responses)

Well, if we want to quibble about Euler's identity, I suppose I need to mention e^{i\tau} = 1, and point to http://tauday.com/tau-manifesto which has a rather lengthy discussion of this.

Tau Manifesto

Posted Oct 29, 2015 12:57 UTC (Thu) by fmyhr (subscriber, #14803) [Link]

Thanks for that link, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Most beautiful equation

Posted Oct 29, 2015 13:11 UTC (Thu) by brugolsky (guest, #28) [Link]

Ha, good luck to tau advocates! I was "traumatized" decades ago, at the age of 10, when I realized that my hero Euler had stained mathematics by implicitly giving credence to the ancient but wretched concept of "diameter"! The "5 constant presentation" of Euler's equation is a consolation prize for the errors of history. ;-)

Most beautiful equation

Posted Nov 3, 2015 10:34 UTC (Tue) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

This manifesto omits all the instances where tau is used as a variable:
Should we rewrite the nome
q(tau) = exp(2*i*pi*tau)
as
q(pi) = exp(i*pi*tau)

Most beautiful equation

Posted Nov 3, 2015 12:28 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

Interesting text, but jeebus, it's not very readable. Could they not have found a way to render the TeX markup? (and I know Tex math markup!).

Most beautiful equation

Posted Nov 3, 2015 14:44 UTC (Tue) by johill (subscriber, #25196) [Link] (1 responses)

I think it's java-script enabled to render that way? At least it does for me on chromium.

Most beautiful equation

Posted Nov 3, 2015 16:34 UTC (Tue) by kingdon (guest, #4526) [Link]

Correct, it uses the (Apache-licensed) MathJax library so if javascript is blocked or malfunctions the math won't get rendered.

Most beautiful equation

Posted Oct 29, 2015 12:29 UTC (Thu) by leephillips (subscriber, #100450) [Link]

You are right, I should have written it that way. The more ordinary explanation for the formula's beauty is that it combines the five most important numbers.