MAGIC SQUARE

APPLICATION OF MATHEMATICS IN
OTHER SUBJECTS

Multilingual network graph

Number system

Then What is it called after one 100 zeros ?

googol

Seven matchsticks form two squares as shown in

the illustration. Move three matchsticks to get
three squares. You can rotate matchsticks, but you
can't overlap and/or damage them.

Answer :

Pythagoras (circa 570-495BC)

Vegetarian mystical leader and numberobsessive, he owes his standing as the most
famous name in maths due to a theorem about
right-angled triangles, although it now appears it
probably predated him. He lived in a community
where numbers were venerated as much for
their spiritual qualities as for their mathematical
ones. His elevation of numbers as the essence
of the world made him the towering primogenitor
of Greekmathematics, essentially the beginning
of mathematics as we know it now. And,
famously, he didn't eat beans.

Hypatia (cAD360-415)

Women are under-represented in mathematics, yet

the history of the subject is not exclusively male.
Hypatia was a scholar at the library in Alexandria in
the 4th century CE. Her most valuable scientific
legacy was her edited version of Euclid's The
Elements, the most important Greek mathematical
text, and one of the standard versions for centuries
after her particularly horrific death: she was murdered
by a Christian mob who stripped her naked, peeled
away her flesh with broken pottery and ripped apart
her limbs.

Girolamo Cardano (1501 -1576)

Italian polymath for whom the term Renaissance

man could have been invented. A doctor by
profession, he was the author of 131 books. He
was also a compulsive gambler. It was this last
habit that led him to the first scientific analysis of
probability. He realised he could win more on the
dicing table if he expressed the likelihood of
chance events using numbers. This was a
revolutionary idea, and it led to probability
theory, which in turn led to the birth of statistics,
marketing, the insurance industry and the
weather forecast.

Leonhard Euler (1707- 1783)

The most prolific mathematician of all time,

publishing close to 900 books. When he went
blind in his late 50s his productivity in many
areas increased. His famous formula ei + 1 = 0,
where e is the mathematical constant sometimes
known as Euler's number and i is the square root
of minus one, is widely considered the most
beautiful in mathematics. He later took an
interest in Latin squares grids where each row
and column contains each member of a set of
numbers or objects once. Without this work, we
might not have had sudoku.

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855)

Known as the prince of mathematicians, Gauss

made significant contributions to most fields of 19th
century mathematics. An obsessive perfectionist,
he didn't publish much of his work, preferring to
rework and improve theorems first. His
revolutionary discovery of non-Euclidean space
(that it is mathematically consistent that parallel
lines may diverge) was found in his notes after his
death. During his analysis of astronomical data, he
realised that measurement error produced a bell
curve and that shape is now known as a
Gaussian distribution.

Georg Cantor (1845-1918)

Of all the great mathematicians, Cantor most

perfectly fulfils the (Hollywood) stereotype that a
genius for maths and mental illness are somehow
inextricable. Cantor's most brilliant insight was to
develop a way to talk about mathematical infinity. His
set theory lead to the counter-intuitive discovery that
some infinities were larger than others. The result was
mind-blowing. Unfortunately he suffered mental
breakdowns and was frequently hospitalised. He also
became fixated on proving that the works of
Shakespeare were in fact written by Francis Bacon.

Paul Erds (1913-1996)

Erds lived a nomadic, possession-less life,

moving from university to university, from
colleague's spare room to conference hotel. He
rarely published alone, preferring to collaborate
writing about 1,500 papers, with 511
collaborators, making him the second-most
prolific mathematician after Euler. As a
humorous tribute, an "Erds number" is given to
mathematicians according to their collaborative
proximity to him: No 1 for those who have
authored papers with him; No 2 for those who
have authored with mathematicians with an
Erds No 1, and so on.

John Horton Conway (b1937)

The Liverpudlian is best known for the serious

maths that has come from his analyses of games
and puzzles. In 1970, he came up with the rules
for the Game of Life, a game in which you see
how patterns of cells evolve in a grid. Early
computer scientists adored playing Life, earning
Conway star status. He has made important
contributions to many branches of pure maths,
such as group theory, number theory and
geometry and, with collaborators, has also come
up with wonderful-sounding concepts like surreal
numbers, the grand antiprism and monstrous
moonshine.

Grigori Perelman (b1966)

Perelman was awarded $1m last month for proving

one of the most famous open questions in maths, the
Poincar Conjecture. But the Russian recluse has
refused to accept the cash. He had already turned
down maths' most prestigious honour, the Fields
Medal in 2006. "If the proof is correct then no other
recognition is needed," he reportedly said. The
Poincar Conjecture was first stated in 1904 by Henri
Poincar and concerns the behaviour of shapes in
three dimensions. Perelman is currently unemployed
and lives a frugal life with his mother in St Petersburg.

Terry Tao (b1975)

An Australian of Chinese heritage who lives in the US,

Tao also won (and accepted) the Fields Medal in
2006. Together with Ben Green, he proved an
amazing result about prime numbers that you can
find sequences of primes of any length in which every
number in the sequence is a fixed distance apart. For
example, the sequence 3, 7, 11 has three primes
spaced 4 apart. The sequence 11, 17, 23, 29 has four
primes that are 6 apart. While sequences like this of
any length exist, no one has found one of more than
25 primes, since the primes by then are more than 18
digits long.

Pascal Triangle