Despite our familiarity with order and organisation in our surroundings — the copy of ‘The Great Train Robbery’ lying on your table; the existence of NaCl in perfect crystalline structure in the salt cellar, and the predictable rising and setting of the sun — the universe is chaotic — the…
On the day of Ramanujan’s return back to India from Cambridge, Hardy, a rather famous mathematician of the 20th century and a mentor and friend to Ramanujan, mockingly blamed his “rather dull” taxi-cab number, which was 1729, for him being late at the port. Proving Littlewood true, yet again, who…
Irrational numbers are funny, the decimal digits go on and on but the entire number is always less than a fixed value, isn’t it awkward? What seems even more astonishing is how such numbers are related to every circle, drawn on a plane, out there in the world! Yes, π…
π is probably the most famous or at least the number that is recognized by most out there. Almost all of us know that if we take a circle and divide its circumference with its diameter, we get π.
It happens not just for one particular circle but all the…
What if I told you, you could subtract ∞ from ∞ to get π, i.e, ∞–∞ = π? Isn’t that absolutely absurd? This is the Riemann’s paradox which was discovered nearly 150 years ago! And today we are going to talk a little about Riemann’s paradox and the Riemann rearrangement…
Fermat’s Last Theorem and Euler’s Conjecture
This is one of the world’s shortest mathematics papers, dating back to 1966. Though it is really short, it packs quite a lot! Let’s start with Fermat’s Last Theorem, which was discovered by Fermat and later proved by Dr. Andrew Wiles in 1993. …
Srinivas Iyengar Ramanujan was an Indian self taught genius, and was probably the only one of his kind. Scribbling, crossing, erasing, he spent most of his childhood in the alcoves of the Narasimha swamy Temple. His devotion to mathematics was such, it was often told that he loved numbers more…
Water drops floating on water may be the queeriest thing youve ever heard, but this isn’t as queer as it might sound, in fact this phenomenon occurs all the time! From raindrops falling on puddles to the coffee that you might be drinking while you read this!
“I have also a paper afloat, with an electromagnetic theory of light, which till I am convinced to the contrary, I hold to be great guns”-James Clerk Maxwell
Electromagnetism, in fact, is a great gun. The inventions of the near past ranging from microwave ovens to mobile phones to bullet…
