Warning: if your relatives ever find out about this website, you’ve sentenced yourself to a lifetime of receives its wares for birthdays and holidays.
Ars Mathematica
Dedicated to the mathematical arts.
Warning: if your relatives ever find out about this website, you’ve sentenced yourself to a lifetime of receives its wares for birthdays and holidays.
Cool! But they need some better consultants.
Writing Maxwell’s equations and saying “Let there be light” – good. Writing them the old-fashioned way as four separate equations instead of using differential forms to write simply
*d*dA = J
– less good. Writing them in the form suitable for condensed matter physics, with D and H fields as well as E and B – worse.
A T-shirt with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle on it – good. A T-shirt with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle on it together with a snip of the Sistine Chapel and the words “FREE WILL” – less good. (Quantum mechanics is not needed for free will.)
“If you consider the set of all sets that have never been considered, will it disappear?” Cute, but silly: for one thing, considering this set does not mean you considered all (or even any) of its elements. Why not do a real Russell’s paradox T-shirt?
And so on. We need some serious math T-shirt designers.
My favorite so far is from Cafe Pi.
Thanks a lot guys! Now, before every christmas and every birthday, I’m going to worry that some well-meaning, but non-mathematical relative will get me something I’ll be too embarrassed to show in public … oh … nevermind.
At some point I really need to make myself a homology diagram T-shirt in the style of Venet (http://www.bernarvenet.com/). You’d buy one wouldn’t you?
I suppose I wouldnt mind a T-shirt with the snake lemma on it.
Trivia question: In which movie is the Snake Lemma correctly proved?
I have to admit that in terms of visual aesthetics, the classical Maxwell equations look better than the differential form version.
I have two guesses:
The Mirror Has Two Faces or Antonia’s Line.
The proof is in a movie called “It’s My Turn”. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080936/) ThIs proof is cited on page 11 of Weibel’s “An Introduction to Homological Algebra”!
PS The “classical Maxwell equations” are actually Heaviside’s equations. Maxwell’s were pretty hideous.