Another post on tattoos. We've all seen sites that show bad tattoos, even laser (ouch) tattoos, but this one shows tattoos that require explanations, explanations I often can't understand anyway. The one for the tattoo pictured is:
"Now, for the explanation. This is a formula called the Y Combinator. It is a fixed-point combinator in the lambda calculus and was discovered by Haskell Curry, a rather prolific mathematician and logician whose work helped start Computer Science.
"What this formula does is calculates the fixed point of a function, which in turn allows for recursion by calling on that fixed point; recursion is perhaps the single most important concept in Computer Science. Being a computer scientist and a mathematician, this formula is very important to me and represents the innate beauty of computer science and mathematical logic."
Or this one:
"It is an approximation of the locus of connectedness for the Julia sets of the family of functions f(z) = z^2 + lambda/(z^2) (rotated by pi/2). This is analogous to the standard Mandelbrot set (which applies to the family f(z) = z^2 + c), but holds additional fascination because for lambda values which are in the interior of one of the subdomains of the connectedness locus, the Julia set is a Universal Curve. To me this represents the structure unifying chaos (since Julia sets are chaotic) and order (since Universal Curves act as a sort of catalog of all planar curves)."
Link
1 comment:
Emailed comment from Lara:
no idea on the first tattoo, but the second one is just using fancy words to try to confuse you.
a fractal: excellent example of cool math. (actually my mom always liked fractals, maybe I'll suggest she get a tattoo). At its simplest: a tree branch that has a branch on it, that has a branch on it, that has a ....
The koch snowflake is one I like: start with a triangle, then on every side, in the middle, draw another triangle (a third the size), you'll find you have a lot more sides that you can then draw smaller triangles on. (wikipedia does an excellent animation of it)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal
so based on the concept of repeatingly following the same set of instructions, a gang of computer geeks got into the tequila and came up with a few formulas (and grouped similar ones together into sets: Julia, Mandelbrot).
all you need to do is come up with a random number to start (pick a number, any number) and put it into one of the formulas.
the number that the formula spits out a) tells where to plot a spot on the screen and b) is what then gets input back into the formula - let a computer do this a whole bunch (recursive) and you have that tattoo.
http://www.angelfire.com/art2/fractals/lesson2.htm
L.
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