The WOW series - Part 1

Wowed ! 

        Ladies and Gentlemen, after years of deliberation by the jury comprising of eminent research and teaching fraternity along with esteemed members of the general public it is my honor to announce to you that the title of The Most Beautiful Equation in the World 2011 goes to , hold your breath yes the winner is -

                                                           Euler's Identity 

 

                        
 

*Tears in my eyes, sob..* isn’t she beautiful ?

But hang on a second, what exactly does most beautiful equation mean anyway ? Aah, well you see this is why your English literature teacher kept on quoting the phrase 'Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder' every now and then.

For most people what is shown above would represent nothing but sheer gibberish and a bunch of alphabets and numbers all put in one place and in fact two of them put on the head of the third. But if you happen to be a mathematician or a science student you will look at it, look at it again, look at it a third time and say that’s freaking beautiful !

The beauty of any equation or theorem is its ability to simplify the complicated ,the Euler's equation relates the 5 most important mathematical entities in the world:

The number 0 , the number 1,  'e' is Euler’s number ( e = 2.718281828…) and the base of natural logarithms ,  'i' is iota the father of complex numbers (the imaginary unit i = sqrt(-1) ) , π is pi the ratio of a circle's Circumference to diameter and fundamental to trigonometry.

It is the epitome of beauty,simplicity and elegance, all in one.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,

One Ring to bring them all and in numbers bind them

                                -Sauron's tribute to Euler’s work in the Lord of the Rings

Of course its not me who declared this to be the most beautiful equation in the world. If it were upto me I would would give it to 1 = 0 !  

( The exclamation mark is not my exclamation but a mathematical symbol representing  Factorial. Hence 0! = 1 is indeed true however you will rarely see zero on the left side of any equation)

It was a poll conducted by The Mathematical Intelligencer magazine that bestowed upon the Euler’s theorem this eminent status. And to quote wikipedia because there’s no way I can quote it any better –

After proving Euler's Identity during a lecture, Benjamin Peirce a noted American 19th century philosopher /mathematician and a professor at Harvard University stated that "It is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth.” 

Stanford University mathematics professor Dr. Keith Devlin said, "Like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler's Equation reaches down into the very depths of existence."

I am WOWed, are you ?