Pi (1998)

PI
movie 1998

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/



One: Mathematics is the language of nature.
Two: Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers.
Three: If you graph the number of any system, patters emerge.


You fly to high,
you'll get burnt.


Have you met Archimedes?
You remember Archimedes of Syracuse? Eh?
The king asks Archimedes to determine if a present
he has received is actually solid gold.
Unsolved problem at the time.
It tortures the great Greek mathematician for weeks.
Insomnia haunts him and he twists and turns in his bed
for nigs on end.
Finally, his equally exhausted wife,
forced to share a bed with this genius,
convinces him to take a bath, to relax.
While he's entering the tub,
he notices the bath water rise.
Displacement - a way to determine volume,
and thus a way to determine density.
Weight over volume.
And thus Archimedes solves the problem.
He screams, "Eureka!"
and he is so overwhelmed,
he runs naked through the streets to the king's palace
to report his discovery.

Now, what is the moral of the story?
- That a breakthrough will come.
Wrong! The point of the story is the wife.
You listen to your wife, and she'll give you persepective.
Meaning, you need a brak.



I'm not interested in your money.
I looking forward to understand our world.

I don't deal with materialist like you.



Remember Pythagoras.
Mathematician, cult leader.
Athens, circa 500 BCE.
Major belief: The universe is made of numbers.
Major contribution: The golden ratio.
Best represented geometrically as the golden rectangle.
Visually, there exists a graceful equilibrium
between its length and width.
When it's squared, it leaves a smaller golden rectangle behind,
with the same unique ratio.
The squaring can continue smaller and smaller,
to infinity.

Remember da Vinci.
Artist, inventor, sculptor, naturalist.
Italy, 15th Century.
Rediscovered the balance perfection of the golden rectangle
and penciled it into his masterpieces.
Connecting a curve through the concentric golden rectangles.
You generate the mythical golden spiral.

Pythogoras loved this shape,
for he found it everywhere in nature -
a nautilus shell, rams' horns, whirlpools, tornadoes,
our fingerprints, our DNA and even our Milky Way.
...
My new hypothesis:
If we're built from spirals,
while living in a giant spiral,
then everything we put our hands to is infused with the spiral.

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Story of Maths: Language of the Universe

THE STORY OF MATHS
Part. 1
LANGUAGE OF THE UNIVERSE

http://www.open2.net/storyofmaths/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Maths

StageVU All 4 parts
http://stagevu.com/video/exzysozqjnvr
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1926910/
EXCERPTS:

LANGUAGE OF THE UNIVERSE

[Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece]

EGYPT
The Egyptians were using a decimal system,
motivated by the 10 fingers on our hands.
But they were using Hieroglyphs Sympbols for that.
The sign for one was a stroke,
10 - a heel bone, 100 - a coil of rope
and 1000 a Lotus plant...

The hieroglyphs are beautiful, ...
But they had no concept of a place value (in hieroglype)
If you want to write million minus 1
then the poor old Egyptian scirbe has got to wirte
9 strokes (9), 9 heel bones (9x10), 9 coil of rope (9x1000), and so on,
a totla of 54 characters. (to repsesnt 999,999)


FRACTIONS

Each part of the (Horus) eye represented a differen fraction.


GOLDEN RATIO
Two lenghts are in the golden ratio,
if the relationship of the longest
to the shrotest is the same as the sum of the two to the longest side.


PYTHAGORAS RIGHT ANGLE TRIANGLE
"It would be some 2000 years before the Greeks and Pythagoras
would prove that all right=angled triangles shared certain properties.


BABYLONIAN
18th Century BC.

"Intriguingly, they weren't using powers of 10,
like the Egyptians, they were using powors of 60.

They used the 12 knuckles in one hand,
and 5 fingers on the other hand to be able to count.


Babylonians invention of ZERO.
[They wrote nohting, left blank space, when they need a zero.]

QUADRATIC EQUATIONS.

BOARD GAMES
"They Babylonians and their descendants have been playing
 a version of backgammon for over 5000 years.


PLIMPTON 322

"Firstly itmeans the Babylonians knew somethign of Pythogora's teorem
1000 years before Pythagoras.


GREEKS, 330BC
"By 330 BC, the Greeks had advanced their imperial reach into old Mesopotamia."


"Proof is what gives mathematics its strength."

"Pythagors is a controversial figure.
Because he left no mathematical writings,
many have questioned whether he indeed solved any of the theorems attributed to him."


Hippasus invented a new species of number:
Irrational number.


ACADEMY:
Plato founded this school in Athens in 387 BC.

"Indeed, the importance of Plato attached to geometry is encapsulated
in the sign that was mounted above the Academy,
"Let on-one ignorat of geometry enter here.'"


PLATONIC SOLIDS:
"Plato proposed that the universe could be crystallised into
FIVE regular symmetrical shape.
These shapes, which we now call the Platonic solids,
were composed of regular polygons, assmbled to create
three-dimensional symmetrical objects.

The TETRAHEDRON represneted FIRE.
The ICOSAHEDRON, made from 20 triangles, repsented WATER.
The Stable CUBE was EARTH.
The Eight-Faced OCTAHEDODRON was AIR.

And the fift Platoics Sold, the DEDECAHEDRON,
made out of 12 pentagons, was reserved for the shape
that captured Plato's view of the Universe.


EUCLID,
300 BC, THE ELEMENTS.
Euclidian Geometry.


ARCHEMIDES
polygons, solds, gravity, spiral.
Catapults.
Pi.


Archimedes was contemplating a problem about circles traced in the sand.
When a Roman soldier accosted him,
Archimedes was so engrossed in his problem that he insisted that he be allowed to finnish his theorem.
But the Roman soldier was not interested in Archimedes' problem and killed him on the spot.
Even in deat, Archimedes' devotion to mathematics was unwavering.


HYPATIA
[movie Agora]
"She was, in fact, a brilliant teacher and theorist.

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