Albert Einstein was born on 14th of March in 1879. Happy birthday dear Albert, happy birthday to you.
In the US, March 14th is 3/14. Since 3.14 is an approximation of π — the mathematical constant of the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter — Americans celebrate today as Pi Day. It began in 1988 at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.
The wiki article on π associates the following people with it:
- Archimedes
- Liu Hui
- Zu Chongzhi
- Aryabhata
- Madhava
- Ludolph van Ceulen
- Seki Takakazu
- Takebe Kenko
- William Jones
- John Machin
- William Shanks
- Srinivasa Ramanujan
- John Wrench
- Chudnovsky brothers
- Yasumasa Kanada
It’s curious that there are three Indians and three Japanese in that list. Quote: “The first exact formula for π, based on infinite series, was … in the 14th century the Madhava–Leibniz series was discovered in Indian mathematics.”
OK, video time. First about Albert Einstein.
And the next about pi.
Happy Pi Day. Today is also the day we switched to “daylight saving time” from “standard time.” More about that craziness in a different post.
Life is a Random Draw 
and here is the most beautiful equation to accompany Pi….
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One lesser known fact about Einstein is that he was merely a expositor of the Poincaré’s principle of relatively. Not its originator. After carefully arguing and citing sources, C K Raju summarises the following in his “Eleven Pictures of Time”:
“The entire philosophy of the theory of relativity, including the crucial insight about time, had been published by Poincaré prior to Einstein, between 1898 and 1904. Most of the mathematical formulae and terminology of Einstein’s September 1905 paper can be found in these papers, and in Lorentz’s 1904 paper. The remaining can be found in Poincaré’s paper which appeared in print on 5 June 1905. (Einstein’s paper was submitted on 30 June 1905.) Einstein appears almost as an expositor of Poincaré’s view; and it seems as if scientists at large have mistaken the expositor for the originator, because of an initial mistake made by W. Kaufmann and then Max Planck, who declared Einstein as the originator of relativity.”
Raju also sarcastically asks “so what if his genius and creativity were not manifest in his youth, and suddenly dried up later in life?”
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I had not known of CK Raju’s book. Thanks. I have now read the chapter on Einstein and it is very interesting. He presents a lot of compelling and credible evidence for his case. Quite often the true evidence is contrary to one’s false beliefs. And quite often experts are wrong even in their areas of specialization. Wigner could have been wrong. And of course pretty much everyone with only a passing familiarity with the real facts of the case can entertain false beliefs without actually wanting to.
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