Birthday’s end
Well, that’s my birthday over for another year. Got some cool stuff, ate some cakes, ate a Chinese meal (from a new takeaway place I hadn’t tried before, which was great, and I made the woman on the phone giggle), watched Back To The Future. A pretty good day, all in all.
Since you all had such fun guessing last year, I won’t say how old I am, other than that my age is now a perfect number!
That’s quite an active birthday for a 496-year-old! :)
27 hours later
Bleedin’ maths people; I thought there was 6 and 28 and the next one was 4×10^33 or something ;-)
28 hours later
:P Sorry. The sequence does grow pretty quickly though: 6, 28, 496, 8128, 33550336, 8589869056,…
If you want to help finding them, you could become part of the GIMPS effort. Or you could try and find an odd perfect number [or prove there isn't one]–no one’s done either of those yet.
28 hours later
I knew about the odd perfect number thing (or, rather, that there probably aren’t any). In fact, I have a truly marvellous proof that there aren’t any, but this textarea is too small to contain it. ;-)
28 hours later
The old ones are the best ;)
Belated birthday greetings, mate.
31 hours later
I want to know what animal represents my birth.
14 weeks later
[...] At the Wolves LUG meeting last night, we got into a discussion of mathematics (see, I told you these meetings were exciting). Jono took the Luddite position that maths was extremely boring and of no relevance to the real world, a position that I imagine he’s not the only person to hold. So I tried convincing him that maths was interesting and had a point, but didn’t get very far. The attempt to demonstrate its interestingness was by relating a couple of maths anecdotes. Firstly, Euler’s formula, eiπ + 1 = 0, which relates the five most fundamental constants in mathematics and is the clearest evidence I know of of some kind of underlying order in the universe, since e and π are both transcendental and i is imaginary and yet they combine to make 1. Jono liked that one. Secondly, I talked about Hilbert’s Hotel, since I think stuff to do with infinities is fascinating and the idea of a full hotel being able to accommodate one new guest, an infinite number of new guests, and an infinite number of coaches each with an infinite number of guests on board is just mind-blowing. That one didn’t go down too well, so I abandoned my third attempt, which was to talk about the difference between aleph-null and the continuum (which is handy since I can’t remember how to prove there is such a difference without Cantor’s diagonal proof and you need pen and paper to demonstrate that). So, I throw the question open. Since I’ve had snarky maths comments every year when I play guess-the-age on my birthday (2003 2004 2005), I assume there are some mathematically capable people reading this. Tell me some examples of how mathematics is beautiful and simple and elegant that can be used to convince a non-maths person what you see in the tumbling world of numbers. Note that the last part is important; if you think that Andrew Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s last theorem is elegant and beautiful then I don’t want to hear about it. I spoke a little about axioms, with the intention of then going on to Russell’s Principia Mathematica and then knocking it all down with Gödel, but we never got that far. The second thing to demonstrate is that maths is really relevant to the real world and has a point. I talked a little about how pure maths came up with i as a pointless theoretical concept and it then turned out to be useful in electrical engineering, but we never got very far into that. So, again, the question’s open. Demonstrate to a non-maths person why maths is important to the real world. Answers involving the phrases “joy of discovery” or “secred guild of scholars” or similar are not wanted here. These also have to be semi-constructive demonstrations: when Dan presented the argument that “maths describes quantum physics and that’s where computers come from”, there was no clear recognition by our Luddite audience that that actually meant anything: how does maths make quantum physics work? Speak on, maths readers. [...]
96 weeks later
[...] I am thirty years old. Over the last few years (2005 2004 2003) there’s been a little guessing game for you all to play, but not this year. I am thirty. Blimey. That’s all grown up, isn’t it? I mean, I’ve got a mortgage and a daughter and whatnot, so I suppose I am grown up, and I pretty much like it. I drink red wine and everything. A whole new decade. I barely remember not being in my twenties. Here comes ten more years of doing cool things, except now there’s a three at the beginning. And I’ll probably be doing them in sensible shoes. Bring it on. [...]
104 weeks later
The most beautiful and relavant to most people is Phi/Golden ration, and The fibinacii sequence
That brings together all perfection and beauty in nature.. Its the formula for beauty
and the ratio for perfection.. followed by plants, trees, humans, and animals
The close you are to being “perfect” the more healthy and attractive you are.. Its not just symetry, its perfect ratio.
Spirals, seashells, trees and beautiful faces all having the same formula, its amazing!!
Anyways, hopefully that helps
Its what works when i talk to people about it..
The way i phrase it is.. To me.. Phi is proof of god.
168 weeks later
[...] my age in 2004 plus four [...]
208 weeks later