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by jrockway
1363 days ago
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> if the formulas end up having weird numbers like 535.4916 or numbers like 2.718 or 6.28318 then obviously there's something suspicious about the equation. Well, 2.718 is different than those numbers, because the derivative of 2.718^x is 2.178^x, which is a very interesting property of 2.718. The same cannot be said about 535.4. (6.283 is the ratio of a circle's, diameter to radius, which is just something intrinsic to the universe. I think it even transcends the universe, but that's hard for me to reason about. But basically, both 2*pi and e are fundamentally interesting.) |
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But it really has nothing to do with the universe, except insofar as maths happen to (imperfectly) match it.
Presumably if the universe seemed to match some other maths, we would have invented that variety instead. The Greeks knew the Earth was round, yet made up plane geometry; and never touched on spherical geometry, as far as we know.
Astonishingly, the concept of the number line did not surface until 2000 years later. With the number line, school children can do on command what the best mathematicians of antiquity struggled with for centuries.