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Dinesh / Photos

Transcendental number

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendental_number


In the prison in Angers she (Helene) wasn’t permitted to hae anything in hyer cell, and all alone, with no books, no paper, no magazines, she felt herself slipping over the edge. She begged the guard for a pencil. On the white walls of her cell, she worked on mathematical problems. When I asked what sort of problems, Helene scribbled down an equivation on a scrap of paper.
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Dinesh said:

I showed my sister Annie, a mathematician, this equation, and asked what Helene had been doing. Annie said, “She was computing the Gaussian integral. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_integral which involves e and pi. Annie explain that 3 and pi are called “transcendental numbers.” Transcendental numbers, like imaginary numbers, exist outside the ordinary math. In the history of math, the concept of imaginary numbers was the cause of great anxiety and drama through the ages as different mathematicians gradually discovered their necessity. In the early nineteenth century, a hotheaded young French mathematician named Evariste Galois was expelled from the Ecole Normale for political activity. Though he was recognized as having promise, his mathematical ideas wee too radical to be accepted by the establishment. He wrote feverish letters the night before he died in a duel, making some notes in the margin of his proofs that involved transcendental and imaginary numbers. Galios recognized there were some problems that cannot be solved with only the concrete numbers of our daily existence. His final words to his brother were, “Don’t cry, Afrred! I need all my strength to die at twenty,” ~ Page 12

THE NINE
2 months ago
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