After watching yesterday’s T20 world cup match, I felt how can be this the best team that India can send to the world Cup? Especially when you look at the following:
- Likes of [Rohit + Raina + Yuvraj] leaking nearly 20-25 runs which in my humble opinion was school boy stuff!
- Ishant and Zaheer sending down such toothless deliveries.
- Can someone remind Dhoni that four is not the maximum. You are allowed to hit a six in cricket!
- Were India safegaurding Yuvi by sending in Jadeja ahead? I never understood this logic of rescuing your best — when it should be the other way round!
For some weird reason, I loved watching IPL to World T20. IPL was a festive atmosphere. Lets move into other things.
400 years ago, the formal study of sciences began. In this post, we look at the tale of two problems - One from physics and the other from Maths. Both these problems have rich history. They have been known to mankind since 4 centuries.
The first one being the famous Three body problem in physics and the second one being the Fermat’s Last Theorem. Informally, three-body problem is:
The problem is that of determining the motion of three bodies moving under no influence other than that of their mutual gravitation given their initial postions, masses and velocities.
This is the longest standing open problem in physics.
Moving on the second problem, it was a problem introduced by Fermat in the year 1637. It remained open till recently and was solved in 1995 by Andrew Wiles. Informally, the problem is
Fermat’s Last Theorem states that no three positive integers a, b, and c can satisfy the equation an + bn = cn for any integer value of n greater than two
An excellent book on the history of this problem is this book by Simon Singh. It offers wonderful insights into the efforts made by Andrew. It took him nearly 9 years of dedicated effort to solve this monster! He uses techniques from the theory of elliptic curves to arrive at a solution.
The first problem, however, remains an unsolved mystery! The contrast cannot get any bigger!
June 15th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
is it possible to summarise the solution briefly in simple words?
June 15th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
@ mythalez
I’ve discovered a really elegant proof. But this comment box is too small to contain it.
lol.
June 15th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
There’s a documentary named ‘fermat’s last theorem’ on the dc. It has the interview of Andrew Wiles. It is generally acknowledged that his proof is too complicated to be understood by us “laymen”.
June 17th, 2009 at 9:40 am
I will try to summarize the stages that led to that result.
June 18th, 2009 at 11:22 am
The first problem can be solved ( approximately ) by computers by calculating the changes in gravitation field created by infinitesimal displacements.
June 19th, 2009 at 9:14 pm
Many approximations exist. One of them is the restricted 3 body problem http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/RestrictedThree-BodyProblem.html