42

 

The Biggest Fundamental Questions That ‘42’ Really Is The Answer To

We’re still not sure what the ultimate question is. Here are 5 excellent candidates.

Touted as the answer to the ultimate question about life, the Universe, and everything, 42 plays an important role not only in popular culture, specifically through Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but in physics and mathematics as well. Too bad we’re still not sure what the question is. (MARTINULTIMA & HABITATOR TERRAE / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS)

The Biggest Fundamental Questions That ‘42’ Really Is The Answer To

We’re still not sure what the ultimate question is. Here are 5 excellent candidates.

Ethan Siegel

Oct 1 · 9 min read

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One of the most amusing stories in all of science fiction is Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where a supercomputer is tasked with uncovering “the answer.” Allegedly designed to give the answer to the ultimate question about life, the Universe, and everything, the computer spends 7.5 million years calculating what the answer would be, and finally spits it out: 42. Only, when the answer is finally revealed, no one can remember what “the ultimate question” actually was.

Fortunately, there are a number of fundamental questions in both math and physics that do have 42 as their answer. Could any of them have passed for the ultimate question about life, the Universe, and everything? Although no one can be sure — even in this fictional world — these five possibilities are among the most fascinating. Here are five fascination questions for which 42 truly is the correct answer.

Quantamagazine

 

Dear Readers, At Quanta, we strive to produce the best science and math journalism as a service to our valued readers. To that end, we hope you’ll take a few minutes to complete our new reader survey at quantamagazine.org/survey. Let us know how we’re doing and how we can better serve you, and you’ll have a chance to win one of 20 Quanta T-shirts, tote bags or books (your choice). Thank you and good luck! Thomas Lin Editor in Chief ABSTRACTIONS BLOG | ALL TOPICS   How Mathematical ‘Hocus-Pocus’ Saved Particle Physics By CHARLIE WOOD Renormalization has become perhaps the single most important advance in theoretical physics in 50 years.

Theorem of Calculus

The Fundamental Theorem of Calculus

Maths and Musings

Jun 27 · 12 min read

The beginner’s guide to proving the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, with both a visual approach for those less keen on algebra, and an algebraic, slightly more rigorous approach, for those keen on exactness.

By the end, I hope you feel a bit more like a mathematician :)

Attribution: By Kabel — Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11034713

Primes and Equations

Unexpected Beauty in Primes

The Visualization of Primes & Its Potential Significance

Jesus Najera

Oct 12, 2019 · 9 min read

The significance of prime numbers, in both everyday applications & as a subtopic pertinent to all branches of math, cannot be overstated. We quietly rely on their special properties to carry the backbone of countless parts of our society — all because they are an irreducible part of the very fabric of nature. Resistant to any further factorization, prime numbers are often referred to as the “atoms” of the math world. As Carl Sagan so eloquently describes them:/.../

There’s a certain importance to prime numbers’ status as the most fundamental building blocks of all numbers, which are themselves the building blocks of our understanding of the universe.

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Primes Euler's formula

Why Euler’s Formula for Primes could disrupt the World This little known but awesome property about primes may change your mind about encryption Frank Zielen in Towards Data Science3 min read

Calculus

Infinite Powers: The Story Of Calculus By Steven Strogatz — Review A rare look at the history and logic of calculus, how it was invented and developed, and what it reveals… 𝐆𝐫𝐫𝐥𝐒𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐬𝐭 in The Startup3 min read

Pythagorean Theorem

Why the Pythagorean Theorem Is True A simple proof of why c² = a² + b² Slawomir Chodnicki in The Startup5 min read

John von Neumann

The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann

Jørgen Veisdal

Nov 11, 2019 · 31 min read

“Most mathematicians prove what they can, von Neumann proves what he wants”

Itis indeed supremely difficult to effectively refute the claim that John von Neumann is likely the most intelligent person who has ever lived. By the time of his death in 1957 at the modest age of 53, the Hungarian polymath had not only revolutionized several subfields of mathematics and physics but also made foundational contributions to pure economics and statistics and taken key parts in the invention of the atomic bomb, nuclear energy and digital computing.

Known now as “the last representative of the great mathematicians”, von Neumann’s genius was legendary even in his own lifetime. The sheer breadth of stories and anecdotes about his brilliance, from Nobel Prize-winning physicists to world-class mathematicians abound:

”You know, Herb, Johnny can do calculations in his head ten times as fast as I can. And I can do them ten times as fast as you can, so you can see how impressive Johnny is” — Enrico Fermi (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1938)

“One had the impression of a perfect instrument whose gears were machined to mesh accurately to a thousandth of an inch.” — Eugene Wigner (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1963)

“I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann’s does not indicate a species superior to that of man” — Hans Bethe (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1967)

And indeed, von Neumann both worked alongside and collaborated with some of the foremost figures of twentieth century science. He went to high school with Eugene Wigner, collaborated with Hermann Weyl at ETH, attended lectures by Albert Einstein in Berlin, worked under David Hilbert at Göttingen, with Alan Turing and Oskar Morgenstern in Princeton, with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen and was close with both Richard Feynman and J. Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos./.../