Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Beholder


So I'm walking down the driveway at Andy's house in Michigan and see this written in chalk. Something like the following conversation takes place:

Me: What's that?

Andy: Oh, c'mon. You know.

Me: Sorry, never laid eyes on it.

Andy: It's Euler's equation, the most beautiful equation in math.

Me: ????   

So I looked it up, which didn't help very much. See here and here.  

One mathematician said it is "like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler's equation reaches down into the very depths of existence".

And another stated that the identity "is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth."

I totally don't get it. Nice to know that in some ways my kid is smarter than the old man.

3 comments:

William Kendall said...

I wouldn't get it either, but algebra and calculus pretty much killed any further math for me back in the day.

Bill said...

I guess I missed the class that explained all that and I'm still here.:)

Stefan Jansson said...

I must have been sick that week, I would have had no clue had I seen that. Good to know that someone in your family got it!