Physics 381 Midterm Report

Michael Dobbs and Demitri Call, Sonoma State University

November 27, 2014
Abstract
We explore the values of Pi and Phi and the myths that have
grown out of them over the years as well as highlight what kernels of
truth there are hidden in these legends. The story of the legendary
mathematical figure, Srinivasa Ramanujan, will be told. Furthermore
the fine structure constant () will be described and an explanation
told of the multiple ways we approximated and how they work.

Introduction

There are many fundamental constants in nature. Scientists and mathematicians strive to approximate these constants to many decimal places in order
to find more accurate solutions. Their irrationality leads to infinitely long
decimal approximations, which one may calculate by utilizing sums and series, as Ramanujan did. Myths and legends have been created in an attempt
to relate these numbers to the answers of questions involving things such as
beauty, the answer to the universe, and the basis of natures patterns.

Calculating Pi and Its Importance

Pi is an important constant because of its applications to geometry and

trigonometry.
Pi is a constant relating the circumference of a circle to its diameter
following the formula:
C
=
(1)
d
1

which can be generalized to any portion of the perimeter using:

S = r

(2)

where S is the arc length, r is the radius, and is the angle measured in
radians. When is 2, the arc length is the circumference. This gives us a
relationship with the arc length and the angle between a line and the positive
x-axis. The relation is expressed by the equality:
(radians) = 180

(3)

The distance from the origin can be expressed in x and y coordinates, corresponding to cos() and sin() respectively. Since has been used in countless
calculations, many mathematicians have strived for a better approximation
of the number.

2.1

The Monte-Carlo Approximation

The Monte Carlo method begins with a circle inscribed inside a square where
the diameter of the circle and side length of the square are equal. The next
step is to randomly place dots within the square, and the ratio of dots found
inside the circle to the total number of dots approximates /4. Refer to
figure x.

2.2

Machins Formula

Machin derived a quickly converging series for the approximation of using

the arctan function:
= 16 arctan

1
5

arctan

1
239

(4)

This equation can calculate to one hundred digits.

2.3

Continued Fractions

Since is an irrational number, there is no simple fraction that can be used

to represent it exactly. Mathematicians have found many continued fractions

that represent . One such fraction is:

=3+

1
6+

(5)

6+

25
49
6+
6+ 81

...

The more fractions used, the closer the approximation.

Myths and Legends

Throughout history, myths and legends of famous numbers have been created
to attempt to unravel the mystery behind them. These myths were fabricated
to account for phenomena, describe the numbers characteristics, and explain
the patterns of nature.

3.1

Pi

In the Old Testament, the verse 1 Kings 7:23 states:

Also he made a molten sea of ten cubits from brim to brim, round
in compass, and five cubits the height thereof
and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about
The myth is that this passage implies a value of equal to thirty over ten,
or three. Some theories say that the diameter was measured from brim to
brim, but the circumference was measured around the vessel itself, therefore
the diameter didnt correspond to the circumference of the vessel. [1] Another
theory dives into the Hebrew language in which each letter equals a certain
number, and a value is given by summing the each of the constituents. In
the Hebrew passage, the word line is written as Kuf Vov Heh, where Kuf is
the value for one hundred, Vov is the value for six, and Heh is the value for
five. Heh is an extra word that is not pronounced and not needed, but when
the length of the line is summed, it gives one hundred and eleven instead of
one hundred and six. The equation then becomes:

111
=
! 3.1415094
3
106
3

(6)

which is a very accurate approximation of . [2]

Many believe that because is an infinite, non-repeating decimal due to
its random behavior, that every possible number combination exists in .
[3] Legend then states that if you convert it to ASCII text, it contains the
name of every person you will ever love, the date, time and manner of your
death, and the answers to all the great questions of the universe. What this
implies is that is normal to every base, meaning that an infinite sequence
or expansion of the digits distributes normally and that there is no pattern in
the numbers. Mathematicians have not seen every digit of , and therefore
cannot disprove that it contains only zeroes and ones after a certain point.

3.2

The Golden Ratio

Two quantities are in the Golden Ratio if their lengths (a and b) follow the
equality:
a+b
a
= ' = 1.6180339
(7)
a
b
There are many myths that involve this ratio. Some scientists say that a
beautiful human face has the golden ratio in its proportions. Studies have
been done to demonstrate that this ratio is found in the beautiful sample
faces, and not found in ugly sample faces, based o the participants opinions.
[4] Dr. Stephen Marquardt patented a beauty mask program that creates
pentagons contouring the sample face, and utilizes the golden ratio to convert
it to a more attractive face. The winner of Britians most perfect face contest
displayed two dozen golden ratios in vertical and horizontal directions along
her face. [4] Although many pretty faces contain golden ratios, beauty is in
the eye of the beholder.
The Parthenon reflects the golden ratio in its front and top structure.
The horizontal beams around the Parthenon are divided at their golden ratio
points. Since the Parthenon is in ruins, the peak had to be extrapolated, so
the evidence for the top proportionality is unconvincing. The use of the
ratio is probable because Euclid wrote about the golden ratio years before
the construction of the Parthenon. [4]
Many Renaissance artists crafted paintings with the golden ratio used in
the composition. Da Vincis Last Supper showed the ratio in the architecture
building, and Botticellis Birth of Venus was made on a golden ratio rectangle.
[4] The French painter Seurat had thirty out of one hundred paintings showing
clear golden ratio lines.
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Although this ratio is found in many places, it is just a number whose

properties have unique applications in mathematics. Its overuse in history
has created a fantasy about it. It is a coincidence that nature has golden
ratios in its geometry and that a beautiful face includes golden ratio lines.

Srinivasa Ramanajum

Srinivasa Ramanujan, born 22 December 1887, is one of the most prolific

mathematicians of all time. His story is one of great inspirational power.
Srinivasa was able to make incredible mathematical advancements without
ever having proper instruction in mathematics, instead his instructor was a
book given to him called Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure Mathematics. This book held many things proven to be true but it did not contain
the proofs for the results stated and Srinivasa used these starting pints to
recreate these proofs himself and learn in the process. At only measly age
of 15 Ramanujan managed to solve the cubic function, a process that took
hundreds of years before him. Once the cubic was completed he went on
to solve the quartic and shortly thereafter started to work on the quintic
function where he finally failed to come up with a solution. The quintic was
eventually proven to be unsolvable numerically so his failure was not from a
lack of capabilities but rather a dead end from the beginning.
While using the Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure Mathematics
Ramanujan became engrossed with and started investigating the series
1
X
1
n
=1

(8)

and using this calculated Eulers constant out to 15 decimal places. During
this time he also started to investigate and discover Bernoulli numbers and
although this was not a new discovery he derived them on his own without
prior knowledge of their existence. This is an example of how he taught
himself; he used old knowledge to recreate newer advancements on his own.
In 1904 Ramanujan started his upper education at a government college
in Kumbakonam funded on scholarships. Unfortunately those scholarships
only lasted one year because all classes but math he failed, not because he
was incapable but because he spent all of his time studying mathematics and
did not care for the other subjects. After receiving news that he would not
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receive the scholarship again he took o on his own and ended up some 650
km north of Madras and his parents were an additional 150 km on top of
that. His parent had no knowledge of this flight from college. During his
time on his own he spent endless hours working on hypergeometric series as
well as the relationship between their integrals and series approximations for
them before realizing that he had really only been studying elliptic functions.
One year later in 1906 Ramanujan decided to give college a second try and
he went to Pachaiyappas college in Madras and intended to take the Fellow
of Arts exam and once he passed he would be admitted to the college. He
may not have fully understood the test but he only passed the mathematics
portion which was not enough to pass the test and did not gain admittance
to the university. From this failure until 1909 he furthered his study of
continued fractions and divergent series until he became very ill.
One year after his illness began; Ramanujan became healthy once again
and at the age of 22 wed S Janaki Ammal, a 10 year old girl, in an arranged
marriage by his mother and it took an additional two years for Ramanujn
and his wife to actually live together. During this time before living with S
Janaki he began posing and solving problems in Journal of the Mathematical
Society. Still in this time frame in 1910 he had developed relations between
elliptic modular equations.
In 1911 Ramanujan got publicized for his work on Bernoulli numbers in
the Journal of the Mathematical Society and despite his lack of education
was becoming well known in his area for being something analogous to a
mathematical prodigy. This recognition led to his approach of the founder
of the Indian Mathematical Society for some job advice. Ramachandra Rao
convinced him to return to Madras and he would try and get him a scholarship. Ramachandra failed at this venture but with recommendations from
E W Middlemast, a professor of mathematics at the Presidency College in
Madras and a graduate from St. Johns College in Cambridge, he received a
clerk position which commenced on March 1, 1912.
This job seemed small but it spurred great things in Ramanujans future.
Being surrounded by many mathematicians resulted in more publications for
him such as On the distribution of primes. This work was published in 1913
by the Chief Accountant for the Madras Port Trust, S N Aiyar. The professor
of civil engineering at the Madras engineering college, C L T Griffith, was also
interested in Ramanujans work and abilities. He even wrote to M J M Hill, a
professor of mathematics at University College in London, on Ramanujan and
his capabilities and even sent a copy of his paper on Bernoulli numbers. Hill
6

gave an encouraging reply but indicated that he did not understand his work
on divergent series and pointed Ramanujan to a paper on infinite series. This
led Ramanujan to send a letter to G H Hardy after seeing Orders of infinity
to which he got a favorable reply. Hardy said he believed that Ramanujan
had three categories for the series solutions he sent to Hardy. The first of
which were some solutions were known or easily derived, the second were that
some were very interesting because of their difficulty and the third was that
there were many that were very interesting because of their difficulty and
apparent importance as well. Ramanujan enthusiastically replied asking for
more favorable letters in order to help him get a scholarship at the University
of Madras.
This letter proved invaluable to Ramanujan because it caused him to get
the scholarship for 1913 and 1914 to travel to Trinity College in Cambridge
to begin collaboration with Hardy. Just getting Ramanujan there was a huge
ordeal in its own because Ramanujan was an orthodox Brahmin which would
have kept him from travel but this was overcome. What was not overcome
was that he was also a vegetarian which greatly impacted his nutritional
needs. After he arrived at Trinity College the outbreak of WWI caused huge
problems with obtaining special foods and this resulted in health problems
for Ramanujan.
Health problems and all, the collaboration was immediately productive,
but there still the issue of his lack of a formal education. Littlewood tried
to teach Ramanujan some things that he and Hardy felt he needed to know
but each time he brought up an idea Ramanujan would bombard him with
original ideas to the extent that his original intentions become lost.
Due to illness Ramanujan did not publish anything for some time and
when he did it was decided that he would only publish his work done in England and the rest from his work in India would wait until after the war. With
the work done by Ramanujan even through illness, he received a Bachelor
of Science by Research from Cambridge; this degree was called a Ph.D after
1920, on March 16, 1916. His dissertation was on Highly composite numbers
and it even included seven papers he published while in England.
The year after receiving his degree Ramanujan fell terribly ill and many
worried he would not recover. Even still, in 1918 Ramanujn was elected to
be a fellow of the Cambridge philosophical society and only three days after
that he was nominated to become a member of the Royal Society of London
to which he was elected in May of the same year. There were various other
elections he received and all of these honors bestowed seemed to improve his
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health and Ramanujan intensified his eorts in producing more advancement

in mathematics. By the end of 1918 his health had improved to the point he
was able to sail to India at the end of February the next year but unfortunately the trip taxed him more than expected and he became very ill once
again. The dierence this time was that even with treatment Ramanujan
was unable to recover and dies the following year in 1920.
Ramanujan led a mathematically rich life and he provided many solutions
to vastly ranged problems, but one blemish on his discoveries was he only
slightly understood what a mathematical proof was and so his solutions didnt
have proofs. This didnt mean that they were not correct but that things
needed to be proven before they could be released as true and some of his
theorems, namely some regarding prime numbers, were definitely shown to
be incorrect. Even with those issues Ramanujan discovered results of Gauss,
Kummer and others in the area of hypergeometric series all independently
of their works. It is thought that his most famous work was on the number
p(n) of partitions of an integer n into summands. He was able to further
MacMahons numerical solutions for small values of n and even to prove it
using elliptic functions. Ramanujans legacy does end with his death however,
approximately thirty papers of his findings were published even after his
death giving everything Ramanujan had to oer to the world of mathematics
and many of which are used still today.

The Fine Structure Constant

The fine structure constant () defines the strength of the interaction between
electromagnetic waves and charged particles. It is defined as:
1 e2
=
4"0 h
c

(9)

where e is the elementary charge, c is the speed of light, h

is the reduced
Planck constant, and "0 is the permittivity of free space. [5] It was first
discovered in 1916 by physicist A. Sommerfield who used the Bohr model
to explain the structure of the hydrogen atom, giving it the quantity vc1
where v1 is the velocity of the electron in the first orbit and c is the speed
of light in vacuum. [5] Sommerfields analysis included elliptical orbits and
the relativistic dependence of mass on velocity, but couldnt explain electron
spin. Although Diracs relativistic theory determined the important parts
8

of the hydrogen fine-structure, the Sommerfield constant or fine-structure

constant still determines its size, hence the name.
Quantum electrodynamics provides a way to calculate by utilizing the
quantum Hall eect. This relates the permeability of free space (0 ) and the
von Klitzing constant (RK eh2 and is a standard for electrical resistance)
to following the equality:
c0
=
(10)
2RK
By measuring the voltage dierence across a conductor, with an electric current perpendicular to a magnetic field, one may calculate the Hall voltage. In
the limit of low temperatures and strong magnetic fields, quantum Hall tran2
sitions occur in fractions of eh , providing an extremely precise determination
of the fine structure constant. [6]
may also be defined as the amount of splitting of a certain frequency of
light in an emission or absorption spectrum, such as the pair of yellow lines
collected from a sodium street lamp spectrum. When light travels from stars
to earth, gaseous clouds may intercept the light and absorb certain wavelengths characteristic of the elements in the clouds. Recently, astronomers
have identified quasars in the outer limits of the universe whose separations
are slightly smaller. They concluded that over the past billion years, alpha
has changed by a hundred thousandth of what it used to be. A changing
constant could lead to solving the grand unified theory by adding an extra spatial dimension. The varying of could theoretically lead to an odd
dispersion of matter, dark matter, and dark energy throughout the universe.
This implies that an asymmetric expansion of the universe could be observed
through the cosmic microwave background. Such a varying constant allows
for stars, planets and life to be created in certain parts of the universe. [7]

Conclusion

As society advances, new scientific and mathematical concepts and proofs

emerge, and the mysteries of the universe are unraveled. New constants are
found and approximated using various mathematical methods, while others
fantasize and mythicize about them.
Srinivasa Ramanujan was an impressive mathematician who has inspired
many with his way of teaching himself and going on to answer some very perplexing mathematical questions. Even more so than his successes, his failures
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on some attempts has made him even more inspiring because it illustrates
that nobody is perfect and no matter ones background great things can be
achieved with imagination and eort.

References
[1] Math, Science, and Technology Blog, Pi Posts: Most Common
Pi Myths url: http://greatmst.blogspot.com/2014/03/pi-month-pi-daypost-2-5-common-pi-myths.html
[2] Wilson, David. The History of Pi,The History of Mathematics. Rutgers, 2000. url:
http://www.math.rutgers.edu/ cherlin/History/Papers2000/wilson.html
[3] Wildling. Number Combinations in Pi. Mathematics Stack Exchange,
2012. url: http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/216343/does-picontain-all-possible-number-combinations
[4] Meisner, Gary., Golden Ratio Myth, Fact, and Misunderstanding. 2014.
url: http://www.goldennumber.net/golden-ratio-myth/
[5] American Physical Society, The Little Constant That Couldnt? 2014.
url: http://www.physicscentral.com/explore/action/constant.cfm
[6] The NIST Reference on Constants, Units, and Uncertainty. Current Advances: The Fine-Structure Constant and the Quantum Hall Eect. 2014.
url: http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Constants/alpha.html
[7] Physics World. Changes Spotted in Fundamental Constant. 2010.
url: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2010/sep/02/changesspotted-in-fundamental-constant

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