aNewDomain.net — His isn’t a household name, not exactly. But today’s GoogleDoodle focusing on the 306th birthday of great mathematician Leonhardo Euler and creator of the Euler’s Constant and Number e won’t hurt his cause. And it will make the constants sound a lot better to a lot of people — music-wise, anyway.
Born April 15, 1707 in Basel, Switzerland — the fact that April 15 is also tax day in the United States is mere coincidence — Euler created a lot of the modern math notation and terms you know well if you majored in math. And studied.
That’s especially true if you dug in deep with geometry, trigonometry, algebra infinitesimal calculus, lunar theory and continuum physics. If that’s the case, Euler is no stranger to you.
Three out of three math websites agree. Euler is the first and perhaps the only mathematician that has not one but two numbers beating his name: Those numbers are the Euler’s Number in calculus — call it e –that is just about equal to 2.71828 — and the Euler-Mascheroni Constant. The latter one, best known as Euler’s Constant, is approximated generally at .57721.
I looked up these numbers up at some of my favorite math sites and on YouTube and came up with some amazing stuff on both Euler’s Number (e) and Euler’s Constant (sometimes referred to by a gamma symbol). I came up with great stuff. So Happy Euler Day. Forget taxes. Listen to Euler’s number and constant embedded in videos below and distract yourself. Heck, sing along.
Here is a musical representation of Euler’s number ‘e.’ It’s a base 10 melody in a major scale … below that is a musical representation, with lyrics and all, of Euler’s constant.
Source: Alan Inocensio
And here’s Euler’s constant to music, lyrics and all. It’s the 2.71828183 — number e song — by Daniel Wedge.
Source: Daniel Wedge
Image credit for above: Google Doodle as displayed on Google U.S. homepage on April 15, 2013