Related papers: Huygens and $\pi$
This article is based on the author's inaugural lecture at the University of Cologne on 24 January 2003.
This paper is a tribute to the genius of the legendary Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (22 December 1887 - 26 April 1920) in the centenary year of his death. The life story of Ramanujan is so well known that it needs no elaboration…
Inspired by the relation between the algebra of complex numbers and plane geometry, William Rowan Hamilton sought an algebra of triples for application to three dimensional geometry. Unable to multiply and divide triples, he invented a…
We study the Ricci iteration for homogeneous metrics on spheres and complex projective spaces. Such metrics can be described in terms of modifying the canonical metric on the fibers of a Hopf fibration. When the fibers of the Hopf fibration…
Supportive attitudes can bring to a blossoming science, while neglect can quickly make science absent from everyday life and provide a very primitive view of the world. We compare one important Greek achievement, the computation of the…
In this short paper Euler gives a highly convergent series for arctan and thus pi, which converges much faster than the Leibniz series for arctan.
E565 in the Enestrom index. Translated from the Latin original, "De plurimis quantitatibus transcendentibus quas nullo modo per formulas integrales exprimere licet" (1775). Euler does not prove any results in this paper. It seems to me like…
The mathematical achievements of Harry Kesten since the mid-1950s have revolutionized probability theory as a subject in its own right and in its associations with aspects of algebra, analysis, geometry, and statistical physics. Through his…
In 1914, Ramanujan presented a collection of 17 elegant and rapidly converging formulae for $\pi$. Among these, one of the most celebrated is the following series:…
In a famous paper of $1914$ Ramanujan gave a list of $17$ extraordinary formulas for the number $\pi$. In this paper we explain a general method to prove them, based on an original idea of James Wan and in some own ideas.
(Quoted from the article) Our object is the theory of "{\pi}-exponentials" Pulita developed in his thesis [...] We start with an abstract algebra statement about the structure of the kernel of iterations of the Frobenius endomorphism on the…
It is well known the method of determining the center of mass of a triangular piece in which it is hanged from each one of its vertices while drawing from the vertice its verticals. The intersection of the three verticals is considered as…
It is well known that there is no closed form analytic expression for the perimeter of an ellipse. In 1927, Srinivasa Ramanujan provides two approximations to the perimeter of an ellipse that are amazingly accurate. However, he does not…
Some Goedel centenary reflections on whether incompleteness is really serious, and whether mathematics should be done somewhat differently, based on using algorithmic complexity measured in bits of information. [Enriques lecture given…
In this paper, we explore the connections between Christiaan Huygens and Niels Henrik Abel through the tautochrone problem. The problem -- determining the curve along which a particle descends under gravity in the same time, regardless of…
We know that the algorithm of Theon of Smyrna (70-135 AD) made it possible to highlight fine frames of $\sqrt2$ by rationals. However, this same algorithm also applies to $\sqrt3$ and makes it possible to find the famous Archimedes…
We present a brief survey of the methods used in deducing upper estimates for irrationality measures of the logarithm values. We particularly expose the best known estimates for $\log2$ (due to E. Rukhadze), $\pi$ (due to M. Hata) and…
Through an application of a remarkable result due to Mishev in 2018 concerning the inverses for a class of transformations of sequences of complex numbers, we obtain a very simple proof for a famous series for $\frac{1}{\pi}$ due to…
The Pythagorean Theorem has been proved in hundreds of ways, yet it inspires fresh insights through geometry and trigonometry. In this paper, we offer a new proof based on three circles that circumscribe the sides of a right triangle.…
In relation to a thesis put forward by Marx Wartofsky, we seek to show that a historiography of mathematics requires an analysis of the ontology of the part of mathematics under scrutiny. Following Ian Hacking, we point out that in the…