Cubic Equations and Cardano

India won the Cricket World Cup 2011 !

Despite my pessimism, I believed that India would win the Cricket World Cup and it did! But, that was like giving up one entire quality (Do they call Pessimism a quality or something else?) of mine just for one Cricket Game! So, my search for an unlikely reason that made India win started.

Now where in the scientific world would I find something related to the occurrence of something due to a totally random thing? The answer struck me right away - Chaos Theory.

Wikipedia says that :

Chaos theory is a field of study in applied mathematics, with applications in several disciplines including physics, economics, biology, and philosophy. Chaos theory studies the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions; an effect which is popularly referred to as the butterfly effect

There is surprisingly a vast amount of plain English for a Wikipedia article! But, after I read about it in another place, it said Chaos Theory was a study of the underlying pattern in apparently unordered data.

If you had seen Dasavatharam, a film that shows hints about the "Butterfly Effect". A conventional example for the Butterfly Effect would be : butterfly flaps its wings, slightly changes atmosphere wind pressure or something like that and finally this evolves into a reason for unleashing a tornado on a country or prevents the formation of one.

So, since Dhoni was the captain (I don't have anything against him or something), I thought "India won the 2011 Cricket World Cup because a baby was born on 7 July, 1981 in Ranchi"

Pretty lame and I don't know if it obeys the rules of Chaos Theory to be an example of Butterfly Effect or something...

Still, Something is better than Nothing!

First the Nth Dimension, then N-digit precision and now N hours of utter boredom!

Even though I wrote around 600-700 lines of code for adding any two numbers of "n" digits, I wasn't satisfied. It took too long to give the result, sometimes it slowed my system like hell - I could've played some game instead of waiting for it to give out the answer.

When you spend around 6 or 7 hours writing code, debugging and whatnot and get "2+3=7" because you misplaced a single variable, it is a very pleasing experience. The patience required to "retain" the code - not even continuing the project - is immense.

So, already having gained patience, I started the project all over but with the power of Parallel Processing - doing more than one task simultaneously like executing two functions at the same time etc. Trust me, even though this looks simple to read, the process underlying it is daunting and by daunting, I mean DAUNTING!

The exams had killed my creativity and 10th standard had slowly erased my programming skills! The "tech-jargons" weren't a problem but using them in the code was really a problem. Microsoft's useless help system irritated me like anything - all sorts of random words in an error message. You can't make anything out of it!

Knowing very well that I couldn't go on like this, I started my usual book hunt. Soon, I got a good one and opened the chapter dealing with Parallel Processing, Lambdas, LINQ and PLINQ. The last 2 are just shortcut expressions for writing normal code. After trying to make sense of a single paragraph for an hour (I don't think group chats with 7 people, random songs in the background, error messages in Visual Studio and the constant urge to think when I'll get to play Assassins Creed Brotherhood or see House Season 1 is good for my human brain...) I thought of keeping the whole thing aside for the next few days.

So, what am I to do for the rest of the time? I was completely bored but simply didn't have the feeling to leave the computer. So, I was browsing through every book I had and surprisingly, I remembered most of them.! Then what? This "What" kept bugging me and is still bugging me now. "What next?" None of my friends were online - dinner time! So, I kept staring at the desktop and listening to the songs like I hadn't heard them before... Then, my dad asked me to switch off the computer. Now, having nothing to do and no one online, I checked GMail finally. I had made up my mind to switch the computer off (and read some story in iPad)... Now, everyone slowly started coming online. So should I chat or leave?

A New Dimension! Part 1 of n

I want to know God's thoughts...the rest are details - Albert Einstein

I just started reading one of Michio Kaku's books. He started off with the example of fishes in a pond and slowly made me realize how I can conceive the existence of another dimension!

I started blogging right after finishing the 6th page of the book. In that page, he casually mentions about a totally astounding conception - the Kaluza-Klein theory. If you will faint seeing hyper-scientific terms, let me put it this way : In 1921, a mathematician Theodor Kaluza proposed that gravity and electromagnetism could be unified under a single setting of 5 dimensions.

This notion can be imagined like :

Imagine that an object is usually moved only towards left or right. From the object's point of view, if it is raised to a height, it will experience a new dimension. So, all types of movements related to it can be unified under a single setting - three dimensions.


Getting back, the Kaluza-Klein theory had a lot of errors which have been fixed by the modern Superstring theory and a whole lot of others.

We definitely cannot "visualize" another dimension as of now. It has been nearly proven that it is a futile attempt to do so. The reason that not all people are able to imagine an entirely new dimension is because the 3 dimensions or the space which we are familiar with is "intuition" and these 3 dimensions are perfectly visible to us. Till now, I'm one of the "people who cannot imagine a new dimension" but with the hope that some day, I will be able to imagine about a new one...