Talk Like A Physicist

Must see : Fourier transform tattoo

Is this for real or is this photoshop?

There is a detailed explanation of the tattoo, which describes the physics behind the Fourier Transforms rather well.

Anyway, the tattoo shows the Fourier transform, one of the most extraordinary accomplishments in mathematics. It is due to Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier, 1768-1830. I won’t put his picture here because he’s butt ugly. Anyway JB realized that in a way, a different universe lives beside us. We are accustomed to x, y, z and t. x is horizontal, y is vertical, z is near-far, and t is time. Everything we can feel and intuit is expressed in these terms. But entangled in this Cartesian universe is another one, a jiggly world of images and sounds and signals and waves.

Anyway, sound is a frequency-domain phenomenon. You can’t understand it in the space-time domain. Some things are strictly space-time, and other things can be seen either way. You might be amazed at how useful it is to look at the visual world in the frequency domain. In fact, that’s how our brain does it. Everything passes through a kind of Fourier transform before the higher visual processing centers do anything with it. Visual computation, for the most part, follows frequency analysis. You have to admit–The Foomeister was definitely the man.

Source David Bradley’s blog  (seems to be down for now)

There is a joke floating around that you know you are a real physicist, when you go to the beach and see the waves, and the first thing that comes to your mind is the Fourier Transforms!

Tuesday tattoo : Pi, infinity and a mobius strip

Nice combination of pi, infinity and a mobius strip

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Pi r-square tattoo

I expected to run out of physics or math tattoos a long time ago, but there seems to be an endless supply.

This is really nice one; and I love the way it is proudly displayed.

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Tuesday Tattoo : math knuckle tattoo f(x)=1/x x approaches zero…

I really admire people who fall in love with a concept, and feel so strongly about it that they are motivated to have it tattooed on their body.

The highest respect one can give to a symbol is to have it permanently scribed on your own self. It is the most personal commitment one can make.

Having a tattoo of a physics or math equation is surely better than having a tattoo of your latest love-interest’s name; he/she may come and go, but you know for sure that the Euler Identity will always remain true!

If you really want to be certain that the equation you are about to get tattooed on your behind remains correct during your life time, go with a math tattoo; physicists are notorious for mucking around with their equations.

Here are a couple of interesting math tattoos:

The story behind the tattoo:

I got the tattoo because I like the idea of math not being well behaved. That sound’s lame and I really don’t mean that in some kind of A is for Anarchy type way. I just think that its kind of nice that something as perfectly functional as math can kink up around the edges.

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Here is another one: e to the x

Photographer’s comment:

My good friends, Nina (L) and Margot (neck/R) are both in the the fields of economics and math. It has some beautiful amazing explanation that I can’t regurgitate well enough to explain. I’ll have them give me a one liner and then I”ll post it here.

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Tuesday physics tattoo : elliptical partial differential equation

All physics & Math PhD students should be required to get a tattoo of the most important equation from their work.

Notes about the above physics tattoo:

“I’m currently a Ph.D. student studying maths in Australia (submitting next week). The the tattoo on the top, I got about three years ago in Berkeley, CA. The other tattoo I got about a year later in Sydney, Australia. Both these tattoos are closely related to the research I’ve done for my Ph.D., which is in the area of elliptic partial differential equations. The top equation is called the Monge-Ampere equation and is the archetype of the equations I currently study. The bottom equation is called the ‘Infinity Laplacian’ and was chosen because it is correlated to variational theories which I find to be beautiful. Loosely speaking these equations are correlated to how surfaces (in arbitrary dimension) bend and curve. I figured since I did half my Ph.D. in the US and half in Australia, I would get at least one tattoo in each of those countries. The tattoos are meant to represent a memory of the time I spent in my studies.”

Tattoo from Greg, via Carl Zimmer

Tuesday tattoos - keep your equations close to your heart

this is one of the most fascinating and odd equation ever; take e and pi and imaginary numbers, combine them in a seemingly random fashion and somehow everything cancels out and and you get zero!

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Tuesday tattoo: imaginary numbers - real ink

One of the most interesting, fascinating and incredulous equation. You look at the equation and you say to your self - vow, really?!! — this can’t be true.

Tuesday tattoo - Maxwell’s Equations

Maxwell’s equation - the secret of life. Your heart would not beat without the electrical currents flowing around in your body!

Tuesday Physics Tattoo: h-bar c tattoo

A perfect way to show your respect to the quantum nature of the world.

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Physics Tattoos - Schwarzschild radius

It’s Tuesday and we show off “Tuesday Tattoos”.

Nothing worse than having a tattoo that is wrong. I think they should have tried harder to write c-square and not C2.