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What Formula Would You Tattoo?
My_Skin_As_A_Cheatsheet asks this potentially painful question:
"I have a friend/colleague who is planning on getting a tattoo in the next month or so. She has decided that this tattoo will be a mathematical or statistical formula, and has been scouring the web and books in recent weeks looking for a cool formula to put on her upper back/shoulder. If you could tattoo a single formula, axiom, etc. (from math, statistics, or any other similar field) on you, what would it be and why? Are there any you think are particularly profound or important? Cool symbols are a plus." Do you have a formula that means so much to you that you would get it tattoed onto your skin? If so, please share it with us. Please try to do you best in HTML (and I wish there was MathML support in something other than Mozilla...of course, Slashdot won't accept those tags anyways...yet!).
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-- Cisk for the Cisk God
is the most beautiful formula in mathamatics
e^(pi*i) + 1 = 0
that has always been one of my favourites. (mostly because it brings several important numbers into one small formula)
The basic sleazeware produced in a drunken fury by a bunch of UCBerkeley grad students was still the core of BIND. --PV
I would tattoo the following:
;)
Integral(E^x) = f(u^n)
Which becomes, when you look at it,
Sex = Fun
That would be my suggestion.
Gentoo Sucks
Everything comes down to:
x = x
If your friend likes non-sequitors, she might prefer:
x != x
If she's intrigued by Zen, she might like:
x = x != x
Though I suppose a more experienced Zen master would just say:
x
The most obvious candidate would be e^{i \pi} + 1 = 0. Everyone agrees about the beauty of this formula, and it also has the advantage of compactness.
1 }-\frac{2}{8i+4}-\frac{1}{8i+5}-\frac{1}{8i+6})}. While this dates back only six years, and is rather less compact, it is arguably very beautiful because it relates Pi to the simple polylogarithmic constants.
Another option would be \pi = \sum_{i=0}^{\infty}{(\frac{1}{16})^i(\frac{4}{8i+
If you want something statistical, how about \sqrt{\pi} = \int_{-\infty}^{\infty}{e^{-x^2} dx} ?
OTOH, if you have lots of space, the Peano axioms (or, even better, the axioms of ZF set theory) would be really cool...
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
You're link is to an article that talks about hepititus. You can avoid this 100% by going to a reputable tattoo artist and not a hole in the wall place.
Finally I think that your comment about seeing a psychiatrist is a little overboard. I would hardly refer to a tattoo as currently cool and trendy.
Tattoos have been cool and trendy for hundreds of years now. They are here to stay. Hard mathematics has been accurate and around for hundreds of years. Thus, tattoos of hard mathematics are not a temporary fad.
Okay, my logic isn't 100% sound, but you get the point. Now shove off, pal!
Keeping
\intragel_0^\infinity \Delta\hartsuit dt = 0
Which is loosely:" and in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make"
But personally I prefer Euler ($e^{i\pi}+1=0$) or Fermatewith but my < body part> is to small for the eligante proof.
Grey (Chris Lusena)
\int{\frac{1}{cabin} d(cabin)} = houseboat.
(For those who haven't seen this before, the left side evaluates to log cabin + C.)
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I've been planning for a while (and this would work for anyone with 8 characters in their last time) to get a tatoo of my last name in binary digits in the form of an 8x8 matrix. Thought this would look damn cool. A tad obscure, but hey.
"Has anything you've done made your life better?" - American History X
"Excuse me, my shoe phone is ringing..."
Pretty much everything in quantum mechanics is hiding somewhere in the damn thing, nobody can actually solve it for all cases, and it's complex enough to boggle the minds of 99.9% of mortals (yours truly included).
There's a good example (LaTeX->image) here.
This has got to be the dumbest question I've ever heard.
If you HAVE to get a tattoo, shouldn't you like something a lot and THEN decide to get it tattoos permanently on your skin?
--
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
Of course if she already has other tats and wants to add a formula as another but doesn't have anything particularly meaningful to her in mind, I think it'd be hard to beat Grey's suggestion or something patterned after it. Failing that, there are all sorts of interesting things to use from the simple, compact fundamentals to larger "unexpected" items. Ask one of the math faculty or a calculus student about curves where the area under the curve is infinite but the volume of the solid created by spinning it is finite.
If nothing else, she should keep in mind that she's likely to be asked semi-regularly what it means, and if she can't explain it she's going to end up feeling stupid. "Hey, what's the math tat mean?" "Um, I can't really explain it, I just thought it looked neat..."
-- fencepost
fencepost
just a little off
1 + 1 = 11
And this one is actually right!
Well, as others have pointed out, you can't beat the sheer elegance of Euler's Formula. But if her pain threshold is pretty high another worthy candidate would be...
In the beginning God said:
[insert Maxwell's equations]
...and there was light.
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
Yeah, quantum field theory is full of interresting equations and operators. Turns out you can develop most of quantum mechanics from the commutation relations of the creation and annihilation operators and some group theory. So these would be an obvious choice. But seriously, this is _very_ difficult stuff. Do you really want to lecture a course in QFD to that jerk on the beach with a mental capacity barely exceeding the ability to sell burgers at Burger King? Personaly, I would think twice about the idea to tattoo any formula. It stinks of some kind of "I'm smarter than you" attitude. It's the kind of attitude that alienates the intellectual people from the "normal" people out there. The first reaction when seeing a formula as a tattoo might very well be: "What a loser. Get a life!".
The equations for Force (F=MA), Momentum (P=MV) or Kinetic Energy (KE=(1/2)MV^2) would be appropriate. (geeky but appropriate)
"I have the most elegant proof of this proposition, but my epidermis is too small to contain it."
Cheers, Toliaro
Another good one possibly, the engineering students (us) put together a tshirt as a limit function: the limit, as GPA approaches 0, of engineering = Business Best done in the sigma form methinks Could do the same for Microsoft Limit as IQ approaches 0 is MS or something
In the time of chimpanzees I was a monkey . . .
wouldnt it be easier to just tattoo, "please kick my ass, and ladies, stay away."
What about DeCSS code?
And there's the Drake Equation about the number of extraterrestrial civilizations. Quite transcendental, if not mathematical:
N = R* × fp × ne × fl × fi × fc × L
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
I've often heard of Gauss being it but I've always admired Euler more than Gauss. Euler may have published more mathematics than anyone else as I read in a math textbook once plus he was rumored to have incredible mental calculating ability which would of course have come in handy since he lost sight in one and then the other eye as he grew older.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
How about a Op-Amp with a feedback loop?
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
What happens when obviously true axioms turn out not to be true?
I'm not an expert, so I hope not to insert foot into mouth. (Although certian other body parts are fine.)
For example. An obviously true axiom: two lines which are parallel to each other can be extended infinitely in either direction, and the two lines will never meet. Problem however. If our universe is the three-dimensional "surface" of a four dimensional sphere, then the parallel lines will meet -- twice -- at each point, halfway around the universe, until each line goes all the way "around" the universe back to it's starting point. Just like Mr. A Square's universe might seem 2D, it might really be the 2D "surface" of a 3D sphere. If Mr. A Square extneds a line far enough, it eventually meets it's starting point. Our line is curved in the fourth dimension all the way "around" the universe, just like Mr. A Square's line is curved in the third dimension, which he cannot percieve.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Geometries
Euclidean-->Spherical-->Hyperbolic
One of the basic axioms of Euclidean geometry is that a point not on a line contains a line parallel to the line. This kind of sounds like what you meant to say in terms of axioms.
It is true that "world lines" in Spherical geometry are "parallel" to each other and perhaps that is what you are really referring to? IIRC parallel lines in this geometry are indeed parallel since the end points are at +/- Infinity. The lines technically do not ever meet.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
findable in any physical chemistry text (usually in the first chapter (maybe second) dealing with quantum). The nice thing about it is that it would be "tunable" for the subject's pain threshold, and it has cool greek letters in it (I say tunable because the form of the Hamiltonian operator depends on what dimensionality system yer lookin' at (hint: if they like to pour hot wax on themselves for kicks give them the 3d polar coordinates version, which expands quite a bit with that lambda thingy (the Lambertian? something like that, I can never recall the name) that ends up in the Hamiltonian).
But make sure they understand what the equation means, like a previous poster said. Covering yourself with Greek gibberish is just as bad as the fools that had the Hip'n'Trendy(TM) Kanji tats done when they don't speak Japanese. I've thought about getting my fav russian quote done, but that's only becuase I'd know if the tattoo artist decided to write "I am a stupid American" rather than "pravda harasho, a chaste luche[1]", which is not idle speculation as a local shop had/has a big flashy kanji tat offering that translates as "I have no fucking clue what this means becuase I'm an idiot." according to my Japanese-speaking friends.
[1] "The truth is good, but happiness is better.", and what I wrote up there is of course just a mangling of english letters to sort of produce the same sounds as the cyrillic/russian words.
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
I've seen lots of people with this tattoed on them
Its the union of the set M with the set m. It looks like this:
M u m
I can't think why it's so popular.
Baz
One of the joys of mathematics is proving the consistency of a set of axioms. In other words, start with a set of statements and prove that none of them can be disproved by using the other axioms. If one of them can be, then you have to throw some axioms out.
:)
In short, given a consistent set of axioms, NONE of them are false. They can't be. If any of them were, then the axioms are not consistent, and that flies in the face of what I told you in the first sentence of the paragraph, doesn't it?
HOWEVER (and this, perhaps, addresses your concerns), when you try to apply mathematics to reality (as you do by asking if lines REALLY ARE PARALLEL) you don't have mathematics anymore; you have physics. You can have a beautiful, consistent set of axioms that describe no reality that ever existed.
BTW, note that, in reality, points and lines don't exist - or at least, they've never been observed. I've seen graphite deposited on paper, I've seen glowing phosphors on a piece of glass, I've seen calcium carbonate dust on slate. But I've never seen a point or a line. Therefore, all of geometry is false.
As was said earlier; it's not worth having some hugely complex formula on your shoulder if you have to explain it to everyone that sees your shoulder on a beach.
I don't see how this is any different from having a mystic sigil tattooed onto your body. A friend of mine delights in explaining what the eye of Ra is.