I'm making the title above sound like one of those cheesy questions from The Dating Game, although it could easily be a Lower or Upper Crotch question. In fact, if Caltech ever ran a version of The Dating Game, this question should clearly be on it.
The question started out with physical constants in mind, but mathematical ones (or ones from other fields as well) are also fair game.
This thread basically started out with the design of ping pong uniforms for the women's team because they made nationals (which occurs in about two weeks) and have to have uniforms. In the process of brainstorming about that yesterday instead of the research I should have been doing, I found out that one of my friends (who is on the team; some of you met her briefly) hadn't seen the Caltech physics baseball jersey I designed with my uniform number 'hbar' (and also that she hasn't ever seen The Princess Bride, but that will be remedied later), so I decided I'd wear that today. She really liked the shirt and wants a version for herself, so there's been a bit of a discussion of what constant she should choose.
Now, I chose hbar just because it amused me to have that as my uniform number, but I was told that that was an appropriate choice for me because I "tend to be short wavelength/eccentric/energetic/uncertain". I admit I'm afraid to ask what it means to be "short wavelength". (There's only one thing that comes to mind, and it's not exactly positive.)
Also, I was amused by Tim's comment about having enough different people get shirts with mathematical constants so that we could form the equation e^{i*pi) + 1 = 0. (Then we could also blow up some SUVs.)
So, I invite you to answer what constants fits you. But let me answer for Lemming. He's clearly represented by the fine structure constant for obvious physical reasons.
Tough one. The closest I can think of is 0x5f3759df, which isn't exactly a fundamental constant, but is indeed very nifty. There just aren't many fundamental constants in my field which I identify with.
ReplyDeleteYeah, Z, I was struggling with that too. I considered 1/ln(2), or better yet 1 / (k * ln(2)), as a conversion between units of entropy, but it's still not very enticing.
ReplyDeleteIf we expand our options a bit, perhaps an Aleph or Beth number (Aleph-null, for example) might be cool.
Now, if we were allowed functions, suddenly there are all kinds of appealing possibilities. I want to be the Busy Beaver function, I dare you to top that!
In my book, it is fair to expand your options. Both Joe's suggestion and yours seem like fair plays to me.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, I actually brought up the delta function as a possibility (essentially as a play on the word 'singular') in the first connected component of the conversation (which occurred while a final was being taken, so the thing needed to be punted), so functions are definitely part of the deal.
I'm afraid of the answer, but what's the 'busy beaver' function?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busy_beaver
ReplyDeleteIt's one of those fast-growing, pleasantly-uncomputable functions. It leaves Ackerman's function in the dust.
Given a Turing machine over the alphabet {0,1} with N states plus a halt state, what is the largest number of 1s that can be on the tape (starting as all 0s) when the machine enters its halt state?
Deciding whether a given machine prints many, many 1s, or simply chugs on forever is a task left up to the reader. ;)
Written as \Sigma(N), it grows faster than any computable function. For N=6, \Sigma(N) >= 10^865.
OK, that's a very impressive function.
ReplyDeleteMy answer would probably be pretty boring, either pi because I have in the past had large selections of pi shirts to wear, or G because that was my pick in Chad's "favorite physical constant" dorky poll a while back.
ReplyDeleteOne can create a "positive" interpretation of the short wavelength comment. If you leave people you interact with in a more positive condition than you found them, then you could be said to be (metaphorically) ionizing them... Also, if you're really short wavelength, then you're really hard to focus. That probably isn't true about you, unless you're entirely self-focused and others have great difficulty redirecting your energies. You could also treat this as an odd restatement of your "ten sigma outlier" self-image. X-ray astronomers like to talk about how they analyze their data at the level of individual photons (IIRC a really bright, high S/N galaxy image will have a few hundred photons detected).
I'm not surprised you'd pick pi. You don't still have large selections of such shirts?
ReplyDeleteG did come up but was dismissed. Given that the initial conversation was during a final I suggested 'g' because of 'free fall' but the response I got was unenthusiastic. (I wasn't serious about it, but it was a snarkiness urge that simply could not be resisted.)
Mason: He that ionizes...
I think all my pi shirts have worn out by now - one left, at most. Cats have this strange desire to not be held, and they take that out on my shirts... ;-)
ReplyDelete