The Universe in Zero Words 

    
                                                                                        

A close look at the stars reveals they are mathematical equations superimposed on the night sky!
When we look at the night sky or the natural phenomenon happening around us, we would never
have guessed that even the smallest of those have given something great to discover and uncover
yet another veil that depletes the distance between us humans and the creation of the universe.
Here, we look at some of these equations, starting with practical ones discovered by the ancient
Greeks, and move forward to the more sophisticated equations found in modern times. As the
mathematical complexity of the equations grows, we appreciate their power and, yes, for their
profound beauty.

Even though we may not understand all the subtle nuances of these equations, we recognize why
they are intellectually exciting to mathematicians. One plus one equals two: perhaps the most
elementary formula of all. Simple, timeless, indisputable. Yet, there is not much evidence of the
discussion of addition in ancient mathematics. We have found Babylonian clay tablets and
Egyptian papyri filled with multiplication and division tables, but no addition tables and no "1 +
1 = 2," which is puzzling.

Dwelling on one of the most popular theorems, you'll be shocked to know that Pythagora didn't
come up with his famous theorem. He had set up a colony in the southern part of Italy, and it was
these people, his followers, who had come up with the formula. Pythagoras took credit for the
same. But, it gets more complicated. It's said that a member of the Pythagorean community
showed that if you take a right triangle whose legs are 1 and 1, the hypotenuse of it by the same
theorem would not be a whole number or a ratio of whole numbers but an irrational number.
Besides computing the hypotenuse of a triangle, two other geometric problems arise almost
inevitably in any numerate civilization - the circumference and area of a circle, leading to the
introduction of the most famous constant, pi. The number is weird, but is it normal?
Mathematicians still don't know whether pi belongs in the club of so-called normal numbers —
or numbers with the same frequency of all the digits — meaning that 0 through 9 each occur 10
percent of the time. There is no finite, root-finding formula that can be used to calculate pi using
rational numbers.

We saw the development of some very famous mathematical terms from some controversies and
confusions, such as from Zeno's paradoxes to the idea of infinity.
Down the line, with further developments in mathematics, we got some fascinating mathematical
terms from controversies; these ranged from Zeno's paradoxes to the idea of infinity. Then came
the age of exploration, and subsequently, we saw the rise of many equations.
Pierre de Fermat was not a practical joker yet, and he had one unusual characteristic: He loved
mathematics. Fermat applied his method of maxima and minima and assumed that light travels
less rapidly in the medium. He showed that the law of refraction is consistent with the principle
of the least time. From this principle, Fermat deduced the familiar laws of reflection and
refraction: the angle of reflection; the sine of the angle of incidence (in refraction) is a constant
number times the sine of the angle of refraction in passing from one medium to anoint her.
In 1988, the magazine 'Mathematical Intelligencer' organized a poll to determine the most
beautiful mathematical theorems in history. Amazingly, four of the top five theorems on the list
were proved by the same man: Leonhard Euler.
'V-E+F=2', an equation corresponding to polyhedrons, came second in the same poll was this
elegant formula. Still, as it turns out, this equation has exceptions that even Euler was not aware
of, i.e., for a doughnut-shaped polyhedron, the formula holds 0 value instead of 2. Pretzel-shaped
surfaces always have Euler's Characteristic -4. These exceptions lead to the birth of an entirely
new branch of mathematics called topology.
Indeed a formula that helps us understand mathematics better is much more beautiful than a
formula that only mystifies it.

At the same time that a revolution was going on in algebra, similar events took place in
geometry. Suppose, for a moment; you are a whale in an ocean. The shortest distance between
two points in your world would be the path taken by sound waves; to you, this would be the
analog of a straight line. Now here's the catch. Sound does not travel at a constant speed in the
ocean below a certain depth, so the path that sound waves travel is not straight but curved.
Whale Geometry is a geometry where some surprising things happen, but they would be
surprising to whales. The sum of the angles of a triangle is less than 180 degrees. Rectangles do
not exist; however, right-angled pentagons do. Most importantly, it is a geometry of negative
curvature. This means that lines that start parallel tend to move farther and farther apart.
Then comes the equations of our time. Although it is impossible to summarize a century of
mathematics in a few sentences, some trends can be discerned even in a few pages. The
connection between physics and mathematics, which had always been close, became more
profound and more mysterious in the twentieth century. Physicists, beginning with Einstein,
were routinely startled to discover that mathematicians had already developed the tools they
needed. Vice versa, mathematicians kept on finding out that the problems and equations of
physics led to the most exciting and most profound mathematics.
This clock saw the uprise of Dirac's Formula from a bad cigar to Westminster Abbey, the Chern-
Gauss-Bonnet equation, theories of chaos, Lorentz equations, taming the tiger, and the black-
Scholes equation.

In the 1870s, mathematicians realized that infinity comes in different sizes; a set can be a little
bit infinite or a lot infinite. The exploration of these different kinds of infinity has led to some of
the most profound and paradoxical discoveries of twentieth-century mathematics.
Going through all the history and interesting stories behind some of the most famous time
equations, following the trends, inviting chaos, What comes next for equations? The enterprise of
mathematics and science worldwide seems still to be in very healthy shape. There appears to be
an upward trend in the sheer quantity of essential formulas, which mirrors the growth of
mathematics and science in our society.
"It's after all not that easy to see much of a distinction between mathematics that was done for its
beauty and mathematics that was done to solve a practical problem."