#eulersequation — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #eulersequation, aggregated by home.social.
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RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@ajcain/115831036668298738
Actually, I would be interested in any examples (other than Kasner & Newman 1940 and Le Lionnais 1946, 1948) of aesthetic judgements of Euler's identity \(e^{i\pi} + 1 = 0\) before 1988, when it appeared (if the form \(e^{i\pi} = -1\)) in a questionnaire about beautiful results posed David Wells in the ‘Mathematical Intelligencer’. It was rated highest by respondents to the questionnaire, after which — possibly in part because of which? — it seems to have been much more commonly called beautiful.
In the four decades between Le Lionnais's essays and Wells's questionnaire, the closest approach to aesthetic praise of Euler’s equation that I located is a passing reference in Arthur C. Clarke's (1917–2008) novel ‘The Fountains of Paradise’ (1979), in which a character considers it to be ‘profound yet beautifully simple’.
#ArthurCClarke #EulersIdentity #EulersEquation #MathematicalBeauty
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Today's post from @paysmaths @Theoremoftheday was on #EulersIdentity or #EulersEquation \(e^{i\pi} + 1 = 0\) (also given in various equivalent forms), which prompts me to talk about a little historical mystery.
Euler's identity is often held up as as exemplar of mathematical beauty, or called the most beautiful or most elegant equation in mathematics.
But when I was researching my book ‘Form & Number: A History of Mathematical Beauty’ [https://archive.org/details/cain_formandnumber_ebook_large], I was unable to find *any* aesthetic judgement of the equation before the 1940 book ‘Mathematics and the Imagination’ by Kasner & Newman [https://archive.org/details/mathematicsimagi0000edwa_l2s0], where it is called ‘elegant’ (p.103). The earliest explicit judgements of it as *beautiful* that I found are in essays by Le Lionnais in the late 1940s.
Does anyone know of any aesthetic judgements of Euler's equations before 1940? (I know of earlier non-aesthetic judgements like ‘mysterious’ or ‘paradoxical’.)
(The history of aesthetic judgements of Euler's equation is on pp.835–9 of ‘Form & Number’, #OpenAccess at the link above.)
#MathematicalBeauty #MathHist #aesthetics #MathArt #Mathematics
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Trying to implement Euler's equations for fluid dynamics, but my values keep NaNing out...
I suspect I missunderstand the gradient of tensor product of u time rho*u...Can't get it to make sense in my head...