March 14, 2021 – 6:15 am ET
By Rich Weissman, Palm Springs, California (www.richweissman.com)
Without these discoveries, our lives today would be much different as we wouldn’t have the math (and hence the science) needed to create a modern world. And let’s not forget Albert Einstein who created modern physics (building on Newton, who also created calculus, and Galileo who were the first to discover the laws of physics). Einstein worked with Emmy Noether, who created abstract algebra (Noether’s theorem), necessary for modern physics (and to think, both Einstein and Noether were Jews who had to flee from Nazi persecution). In Archimedes’ honor, on Einstein’s birthday, I think we should celebrate Pi Day by eating lots of pies. Maybe I’ll have 3.14 pies (peach, cherry, apple, and a small slice of blackberry).
BTW, at my company, at our corporate office, we named each
conference room after a great mathematician - Euclid, Al Kwarizmi, Noether,
Newton, and others, and of course, Karl Pearson, the creator of statistical
testing, including the correlation coefficient, chi-square, and the t-test, and
who brought more complex probability measurement analytics front and center in
the discipline of statistics (that was my area of my Ph.D. program). We had
very large framed posters on the walls in their respective conference rooms
with their faces (ancient drawings/paintings/old photos), a description of each
mathematician, and the most famous formula each created. We paid homage to
these great minds, and they inspired us to think of new and creative forms of
data analytics. Within the company, we had our think tank, whose only role was
to create new ideas and concepts in multivariate data modeling technologies (we
created a cutting-edge inferential cognition system which integrated
behavioral, demographic, geographic, psychographic, econometric, financial,
transactional, and many other complex data sets to develop algorithms and
advanced intelligence through data interactionism). And it was fun (albeit hard
work. So hats off to Archimedes and the discovery of pi, and to some tasty pie
eating.