#math

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⭕️Celebrate Pi Day with a Slice of Science⭕️

What better way to honour this mathematical marvel (π) than by baking a delicious pie that resembles the CMS detector? 🥧

Today, embrace the magic of circles – from pizzas and pancakes to clocks and planets. 🪐🍕
Take a moment to appreciate the beauty and wonder of math in our everyday world.

commented on The Water Outlaws by S. L. Huang

S. L. Huang: The Water Outlaws (Hardcover, 2023, Tor.com) 5 stars

In the jianghu, you break the law to make it your own.

Lin Chong is …

Lu Da's staff weights "60 jin". A Jin is a little more than a US pound, so it's about 54.5 pounds. Which seems heavy as fuck for a staff.

A modern Chinese Gun (Staff) is six feet long and an unspecified on Wikipedia thickness. At an inch thick, a six foot oak staff would be like, 2 pounds. Even an inch thick staff of pure lead (the most common "really heavy, yet fashionable" thing I can think of,) would only be 23 pounds.

Now, given this is wuxia, so fantasy, and I don't know what kinds of metals were available during the Song dynasty, it could be something fantastic rather than real, but were it real, it might be an inch and a half lead core with a quarter inch of iron around that for support.

That is fucking big.

#TheWaterOutlaws #SLHuang #Wuxia #Math

NASA Unveils Design for Message Heading to Jupiter’s Moon Europa

The moon shows strong evidence of an ocean under its icy crust, with more than twice the amount of water of all of Earth’s oceans combined. A triangular metal plate on the spacecraft will honor that connection to Earth in several ways.

https://www.nasa.gov/missions/europa-clipper/nasa-unveils-design-for-message-heading-to-jupiters-moon-europa/

The art on this side of the plate, which will seal an opening of the vault on NASA’s Europa Clipper, features waveforms that are visual representations of the sound waves formed by the word “water” in 103 languages. At center is a symbol representing the American Sign Language sign for “water.” NASA/JPL-Caltech

On the first use of decimal points: https://www.npr.org/2024/02/24/1233702474/the-decimal-point-was-in-use-150-years-before-previously-thought-research-shows

My discomfort with the decimal / base 10 system is...it's too popular. For too many people, it's our only conceptual way of understanding real numbers.

I remember taking real analysis as an undergrad, and not really getting it. It took me years until I could pry my brain away from conceiving of real numbers as something different from their representation as decimal expansions.

For example, people say π "is" 3.14159...and that it "goes on forever". Well, no: the sequence of symbols that starts with 3.14159 is one way of *representing* π, and it's only that representation that goes on forever; as a number, π is, well: π.

If I ever get the chance to teach undergrad real analysis, I want to focus the course on showing students just what the real numbers (and functions thereof) *are*, and how unspeakably strange …