Lord Kelvin Quote by Matt Parker

““Much as it took Lucas to revolutionize the search for Mersennes primes and Lord Kelvin to introduce new ways to look for space-filling-shapes, I think we're still waiting for the key mathematical techniques needed to fully understand knots. I suspect a new generation of mathematicians will have to go to university and become knot theorists on order to give us such a breakthrough.””

Matt Parker

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Lord Kelvin

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“Along with working on the Basel problem, Euler realized that adding an infinite sequence of reciprocal powers for all whole numbers will give you the same answer as multiplying together an infinite sequence of fractions which use only the prime numbers. So the zeta function can be written as two different equations, one of which relies only on the prime…

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“I was believing your kind were all dead!' Warvitch bellowed at the minotaur, over the sithkall's choking death growls. 'It will be a great…

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“Despite their ubiquity on the number line, transcendentals are surprisingly hard to pin down. It took until 1873 to prove that e was transcendental, making it the first number we knew for definite was. The poster-child of maths, pi, didn't join the transcendental fold until 1882. Even today, we know that at least one of e + pi and e…

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“The proof in 1882 that pi is a transcendental number put a 2,000 year old problem to rest: for any given circle, can you draw a square of the same surface area using a compass and a straight edge? Since 1882, we know that no, you can't. To draw a square the area of a circle you need to be…

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“The compact disc may now be outdated technology, but a lot of music albums are still released on CD. A standard 700-megabyte CD is actually 703.125 megabytes (a rare case of the music industry giving something extra away for free), which is a total of 5,898,240,000 1s and 0s. By my calculations, the number of possible different CDs in base-10…

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“The zeta function is the sum of an infinite sequence of inverse powers.”

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“At a very rough estimate, the domino computer we built took six hours to set up and run, which means it could do four calculations per day, if you had a team of domino-computer builders working around the clock. This is a terrible rate of one calculation every 21,600 seconds, equating to a processor speed of 46.3 microhertz. Which makes…

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“In our current number system, if you multiply 111,111,111 by itself, you get the rather pleasing 12,345,678,987,654,321 (all the digits count up from 1…

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“For DNA to reproduce, it needs to unzip itself down the middle, and the topology of the dna chain dictates which knots are formed…

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“To this day, the Clay Mathematics Institute's bounty of $1 million for anyone who can prove that all the non-trivial zeroes of the zeta…

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“The Riemann Hypothesis states that all the non-trivial zeroes of the zeta function are on this line. If we can prove the Riemann Hypothesis is true, then we'll also have proved the method for counting the prime numbers. In some weird twisted act of mathematical logic, at a fundamental level the alignment of these zeroes stems from the same logic…

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“I find this whole area of packing problems hugely exciting. Humans know very little about the mathematics of packing objects into spaces. It seems like a simple thing to do: arrange objects around each other to take up as little space as possible. But we just can't seem to get it right. The really fascinating thing, though, is that the…

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More Lord Kelvin quotes

The story is told of Lord Kelvin, a famous Scotch physicist of the last century, that after he had given a lecture on atoms and molecules, one of his students came to him with the question, "Professor, what is your idea of the structure of the atom." "What," said Kelvin, "The structure of the atom? Why, don't you know, the…

Arthur Compton

“People had no sense of history, they learned about chemistry and biology and astronomy and thought that these matters had always been the proper meat of science, that they had never been mysterious. The stars had once been mysteries. Lord Kelvin had once called the nature of life and biology - the response of muscles to human will and the…

Eliezer Yudkowsky