The sine of the beast
18th December, 2008
Two things (one interesting, one very silly) that I have recently learnt about the sine function:
1. The sine rule, as most school-students know, says that in any triangle, 
is constant, whichever side A and opposite angle a you pick.
Less well-known is that this quantity actually has a geometric meaning: it gives the diameter of the triangle’s circumscribing circle. The Math Less Travelled has pictures.
2.
This may seem an innocuous enough fact. But prepare to be amazed! If you convert 
into degrees, you get 666o, which is of course the the Number of the Beast. And you might spot the ubiquitous Golden Ratio 
lurking on the other side of the equation. So now our formula becomes:
The standard numerological-satanic interpretation of this fact, I am reliably informed, is that the Devil is the opposite of God (hence the minus sign), and only half as powerful. Where exactly the trigonometry fits in, I’m not sure…
Categories: Crankishness, Maths | Comments (0) | Permalink
The Chaos of El Naschie
13th November, 2008
If you read the December 2008 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Chaos, Solitons, & Fractals, you’ll find an article entitled On the vital difference between number theory and numerology in physics.
Perhaps the editor-in-chief of that journal, Mohammed El Naschie, should start paying attention.
Elsevier are the world’s biggest publisher of scientific journals, and they are by no means universally loved for it. This particular journal has pseudo-scientific form. But for the post of editor-in-chief to become compromised like is an unparalleled indictment.
John Baez, in the comments to his post, adds: “A rather famous mathematician, upon reading this blog entry, has promised to contact Elsevier and pressure them to do something about this situation. We’ll see what happens (if anything).”
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Bad Science 1 - Bad Medicine 0
15th September, 2008
Categories: Bloggery, Crankishness, General Science, Politics | Comments (0) | Permalink
RH ≠ NP
5th July, 2008
Maybe it’s lucky Li’s proof of the Riemann Hypothesis didn’t work out, since…
“…if a proof is found, it has the potential to lead to the undermining of current encryption methods, which depend on the difficulty of factoring large prime numbers.”
Current encryption methods are pretty crap, aren’t they?
Categories: Crankishness, Maths, Nonsense | Comments (0) | Permalink
Riemann Hypothesis
3rd July, 2008
Or maybe it really has?
Well, it’s just a pre-print, not yet peer-reviewed or published, so the sensible money’s got to be firmly on “not” for the time being.
The Developer On Line blog has an interesting post pointing out that the university responsible does have some form in this regard.
The story is that in 2004, Louis de Branges released a “proof” (and an accompanying expository apology [pdf]), which was met with near universal eyebrow-raising. Among the skeptics was Xian-Jin Li, his former PhD student, who indeed had previously coauthored a paper containing counterexamples to De Branges’ approach.
Now Li is claiming his own proof. How much it’s based on De Branges’ I couldn’t say (but he doesn’t get a reference).
Anyone who claims to have proved the Riemann Hypothesis is gambling with their reputation, and of course such claims are ten a penny. But it should be noted that these folks are[1] serious mathematicians, and not total cranks.
UPDATE: Terry Tao and Alain Connes both say “no”. Ok, Li’s apparently “updated” the paper since, but…
False alarm folks. Maybe next time he might think to ask some experts to check the paper before going public?
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Can you hear the golden ratio?
18th March, 2008
It’s a celebrated fact that the golden ratio produces beautiful shapes. But do its aesthetic qualities extend to music? Michael S. Schneider thinks he’s found it in one of the centrepieces of drum and bass.
[Via NI]
Categories: Crankishness, Maths, Music | Comments (0) | Permalink