Pi Day (March 14, or 3/14) gets a lot of play in the U.S., but doesn’t work in other countries that write dates as DD/MM/YYYY, so it becomes 14/3. An alternative in those areas is e day, after the base of natural logarithms, e, (2.71) on 27 January. So, we’re going to avoid the Pi Day rush and post some math cartoons today.
Like pi, e shows up in a variety of places in mathematics, and is associated with some of the greats in mathematical development. From Wikipedia:
“The number e is sometimes called Euler’s number …—after the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler —or Napier’s constant—after John Napier. The constant was discovered by the Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli while studying compound interest.”
Some fuzzy math from websites. The first is from Kiva.org.
This one is from MyVirtualMission.com, a site where you can virtually pretend to climb Everest or complete the Camino de Santiago as you run/walk/bike around your neighborhood. Somehow, their counter of missions (trips) has gone awry. Or maybe I did one backwards?
Comics I Don't Understand 
I celebrate Approximation Day on 22nd July.
@Ian, so very rational of you!
I liked the repeating decimal one so much, I teared up.
I have the XKCD one on my office door. If you know physics, the last one (psi) is a double pun. Not only does it look like a trident, but it’s also the standard symbol used for a Wave Function.
😁
I like that idea of Approximation Day.
With XKCD, it would be useful to have either the hover text or a link to the original.
_If you ever see someone using a capital xi in an equation, just observe them quietly to learn as much as you can before they return to their home planet._
https://xkcd.com/2586/
The capital xi suggests the prefix “xeno-” indicating something foreign, strange, outside the normal, or from far away, such as beings from another planet.
I’m not sure about the gamma. Gamma rays from a pew-pew-pew space laser gun?
Lower case sigma is standard deviation and any time I try to apply standard deviation to real life it doesn’t work. Standard deviation is a contradiction in terms anyway, because “deviant” means non-standard.
I will further refer you to Explain XKCD for a complete description:https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2586:_Greek_Letters
I’m not entirely sure why the markdown didn’t work. I don’t see any inadvertent gaps.
_Have they removed markdown?_
“e” is a letter, dagnabbit!
:-P
Also, I don’t get the repeating number bar one.
@ Grawlix (10) – If you remove the bar from that one three, then the representation changes to an infinite series of threes, which is what busted the wall in the first place.
@Brian, See my previous comment in this thread on “Why isn’t HTML working in comments” and the continuation on Site Comments. Depending on what interface you are reading in, and then making a comment from, WordPress may put you in the block-oriented editor. And in that tool, yes HTML markup is not working (rather, it is printed but not interpreted), nor, I gather, Markdown (same thing – prints but is not interpreted).
In that blocks-oriented editor, there is a limited amount of print styling available when you are in a Paragraph block thru I and B buttons which give you italics and bold, in a WYSIWYG way. There is also a link button.
Besides the default Paragraph block, for text, there is an Image block, which does not let you upload an image you have as a file, but does accept a URL to lead top the image; it thus serves the purposes of the rather belabored instructions we have traditionally handed out for “embedding an image in a comment”. (There is also a block called “Embed” but it seems to want to reproduce and entire webpage.)
While every Greek letter is used somewhere in science and/or math, capital Xi is one of those that is very rarely seen. (Some other capitals are also rarely used, but that’s because they look like “regular” letters, such as omicron as O or tau as T. Capital Xi is just weird.)
Approximation Day does not work for me. I am the sort of the person if a calculation is out by even as small an amount as a penny I will sit as long as it takes to find the error. And have been like this since I first started working in arithmetic. However it is a good thing for an accountant.
For amounts that small on our records – after all who else keeps a full set of books for their personal bank accounts, etc. (but I don’t keep liability accounts for credit cards, do keep same for car loan/mortgage when we have same) – Robert will say that it does not matter for so small an amount when I sitting there screaming about not finding the small errors, but I have to.
We may not be able to find things in the basement or where we put some Christmas decoration last year, or still have out the indoor Christmas decorations when it is about to be February, but a difference in “the books” – I cannot live with. (One year the indoor Christmas decorations were still up in March when clients came in about their taxes – the garage door had frozen to the ground in the detached garage and we could not get into it – no side door then – and since nothing could be boxed and put away – just left it all in place decorating the inside house into the spring. (Garage now has a regular door on the side.)
Here is a note on the Why Evolution Is True blog https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/02/07/wednesday-hili-dialogue-467/ about some people taking February 7th, or 2/7 in American notation, as the date to celebrate e day.