Mathematics as Body Art

Found this picture somewhere on internet. The equation -is- beautiful, no doubt about that, so why not paint it on your body if you are into that stuff anyway?

PI encoded in a crop circle

Linda Moulton Howe wrote on her website EarthFiles

“The fact that the Pi decimal point is included (in the 2008 Barbury Castle barley pattern) and there is rounding up to 10 decimal places is to me a little mind boggling!”Michael Reed, Astrophysicist 

The Barbury Castle Glyph. A crop circle representing the number Pi.

The first ten digits of Pi are 3.141592654 with a decimal point after the first digit. Read the crop circle from the center on outwards and follow the lines in clock order. Then you see a line, a dot, a line and onwards. There are ten line segments. Next line segments start further away from the center of the crop circle. The relative lenghts of the individual line segments are then respectively 3 1 4 1 5 9 2 6 5 4. And these are the first ten digits of Pi with the last digit correctly rounded.

Pi is in that circle alright. But what does that mean? In my opinion this can only mean two things:

1. this particular crop circle is man-made;
2. if this crop circle is not man-made then it has been made by an intelligent 'being'.

I used to believe that at least some crop circles appeared instantaneously without human intervention. Nature is full of beautiful patterns, so why not in crop fields? For me it is very hard to believe that Pi encoded circles can suddenly appear.

The crop community is rather excited about this 'formation'. I am not because for me it is like the end of an era. Santa Claus is not real after all. The more I look at it the more I recognize it as man-made.

The intelligent beings who created this crop circle must have been math students. Must be. If they only were brave enough to come forward. - Producing a similar circle with the first ten digits of another mathematical constant would be more hilarious though.

Choose life. ;-)

An interesting tool

While browsing the OpenLearn LearningSpace site I found a new software tool for Visual Thinking: Compendium. I currently use Mind Manager for 'visual thinking' but imho Mind Manager is more suited for supporting project planning and designing documents and presentations than stimulating deep thought about a particular topic you don't yet fully understand. A tool that supports the thinking from not completely understanding to a full cognition of the subject would be very welcome in my collection of software. I'll give it a try.