Happy Pi day

[bloodhound]

altough most pple would hate to admit it, the french really have contributed so much stuff to this world

[ed84c]

not as much as we brits

[bloodhound]

of course of course.

[Tesseract]

I thought date format was my-yd-ydmy

[Martin]

hmm somebody has either muddled up the acronym or iso is international organisation for standardisation in [i'] French [/i]

 

 

In French the acronym is OIN

Organisation Internationale de Normalisation

 

the choice of the acronym was a "compromise" or friendly merger between French and English

 

In english the natural way to form the acronym would say IOS

International Organization for Standardisation

 

the "history of the name" paragraph at the official ISO website says

that because it was different (OIN != IOS) they chose to make a

veiled reference to the Greek word ISOS meaning EQUAL

and to make the acronym neither exactly French or exactly english

but rather ISO

 

Here is what the French ISO site says:

"Parce que le nom de l'Organisation internationale de normalisation donnerait lieu à des abréviations différentes selon les langues ("IOS" en anglais et "OIN" en français), il a été décidé d'emblée d'adopter un mot dérivé du grec isos, signifiant "égal". La forme abrégée du nom de l'organisation est par conséquent toujours ISO."

 

(American engineers would have been happy with it because they would naturally want to say "international standards organization" in any case)

[Martin]

When is the day for the fine structure constant alpha?

 

this number is as important and universal as pi

 

the approximate value (analogous to 22/7 for pi) is

 

[math]\frac{1}{137}[/math]

[bloodhound]

22/7 is a really crap approximation of pi

 

what is fine structure constant?

 

[edit] dont worry, found it[/edit]

[ed84c]

or that number 5.something that is used almost every where in the universe and that number psi i think 1. something which squared is the same as plus one.

[bloodhound]

that number is interesting but not really that important compared to e and pi

[ed84c]

e?

[Martin]

e?

 

there is only one non-zero function which is equal to its own slope

 

 

that is, f'(x) = f(x)

 

for all real numbers x from minus infinity to plus infinity.

 

mathematicians have a special name for f(1)

they call it e. and the value is 2.71828...

 

it is also called "base of the natural logarithms"

which is fine if you know what base means

and natural means

and logarithm means

 

but the main thing is that in the whole universe of mathematics there is only this one unique nontrivial real-valued function f(x) which equals its own slope, i.e. its derivative.

and BTW all its derivatives are the same, f = f' = f" = f"' and so on

 

and e is just a conventional symbol for the value this function has at 1:

 

e = f(1)

[Martin]

I find alpha = 1/137 a lot more interesting than e

because alpha tells you how strong the electrodynamic coupling is

It tells you about nature.

 

Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) is a theory based on this one parameter alpha and everything is calculated from formulas and powerseries in alpha.

So you plug in alpha and you find the periodic table of elements and

you find chemistry and you find how hot stars are and how fast they burn their fuel and a lot of interesting stuff.

 

but e = 2.71828 has to exist by mathematical necessity and it has to be what it is. You dont have to measure it experimentally it just comes out of human mathematics.

It occurs in lots of formulas because it is dictated by human custom how we shall write hour formulas and it is in accordance to the conventions to use e.

But I do not think that e tells very much interesting stuff about nature. It could not be different however different nature was.

 

Whereas if alpha was a few percent different nature would be radically changed. Intuitively the number contains information. So I went and put May 17 (the 137th day of the year) on the SFN calendar for next year, so as to have an Alpha Day