The blackboard is from Interstellar, but I can’t make out enough of the math to see what it’s about—to the left, there’s something about ‘brane’ and ‘curvature’, which would make sense in the context of some hypothetical future gravitational theory—IIRC, they were hypothesizing about a kind of ‘braneworld’-scenario, where our universe is just a kind of surface—a brane—in a higher-dimensional space. The bits in braces seem to be mostly values for certain parameters.
The movie had Kip Thorne as a scientific advisor, so most of the physics (on the blackboard) is probably speculative, but not outrageously so—in fact, he’s written a book, The Science of Interstellar, which should cover most of what’s on those boards.
(By the way, do you just do google searches for ‘math blackboard’ every once in a while, or how do you find these?)
Yeah, it’s tough to say much about this latest picture without context (those Ws could stand for almost anything), but it does appear to be tensors of some sort, which is consistent with it being GR.
The fact that the Ws have subscripts of “w” and “y” suggests, to me, that there’s a w coordinate being used in addition to the familiar x, y, z, and t, which would be consistent with it being brane work.
No. I’m just slow on the uptake (as one poster put it) of mass-ish culture, and like it when I see other bits of culture appropriated. In fact, just got around last night to seeing this next one. So it’s kind of a gimme, I guess, but I don’t know what the problem is called, although he mentions the general field (no idea if what he says is right, or how, of course): Imgur: The magic of the Internet
But in Googling around for that image (actually, Bing-ing, but sucks to be Microsoft), I did find this, the source of which I did not see, but is worth mentioning because it is not dissimilar in presentation to others: Imgur: The magic of the Internet
But damn, that handwriting is good, and not dissimilar to the script in the last cite above. Which my keen eyes for anatomy tell me is not the same body plane. Could be his…
Is it really (as I suspect) it’s trying to be, “let’s do something funny with a guy passed out drunk?”
Mostly trigonometry, with a few geometry formulas. It looks like what a student might put on a one-page “cheat sheet” for a test (in quotes because professors will often explicitly allow a single sheet, and so it’s not actually cheating), but which a professional probably wouldn’t bother with because they’d have it all memorized.
The lower-left quadrant is the geometry formulas, it looks like mostly surface area and volume. The lower-right quadrant is the graphs of sine, cosine, tangent, and cotangent. On the top left, we have a labeled diagram of a triangle, giving the definitions of the various trig functions, then to the right of that an abbreviated table of values of trig functions for some often-encountered angles, then below that a labeling of the quadrants of the plane, then below that some often-used trig identity formulas.
Actually, let me amend that: The diagrams and graphs look rather neat to be student work. So it might instead be a pre-printed reference sheet provided by the teacher for the students, copied exactly onto the guy’s back. And yes, the most likely reason is as a prank on a passed-out guy, because its not like he can read them himself, nor is he going to be lifting up his shirt in the middle of a test to help out the student behind him.
It’s so neat I wonder if it is Photoshopped onto the photo? Otherwise, they were using rulers on the guy’s back, and oval templates. Who can draw sine waves that perfect on a moving plane?
I was thinking they used either a projector or a printout on porous paper, and traced over it with marker. But I’ll admit that it’s hard to imagine either being present in a context where students would be passed out drunk.
Looks posed to me. The lettering in the lower left seems to bend the exact same way his back is bending there, meaning it was written when he was standing or lying straight. Plus the lines in the lower right go down into his pants; I don’t really see pranksters pulling down the drunk guys pants to get the lines right then carefully pulling them back up again.
As an aside, it used to be quite common for movies showing “smart folks” to have blackboards covered in mathematical symbols, but for the symbols to just be arranged randomly. Which looks about as wrong to us math/science types as a board covered in random letters does to an ordinary person. It’s one thing for a board full of text to contain words you don’t know, or even for it to be in a language you don’t know: It’ll still look like writing, in a way that just random letters wouldn’t. In a similar way, blackboards covered with equations look real (to us) in a way that just random symbols don’t.
Thankfully, Hollywood has mostly now learned that technical advisors work for cheap, and are happy to cover a few boards with meaningful symbols to put in the background of a classroom or laboratory shot.
I found this in my saves from a few years ago and don’t think I posted it for OP query; although the word expansion series is in my mind and its presence there is otherwise unaccountable.
This actually looks an honest-to-God tattoo, which merits its appearance here anyway (unless its upthread :)).
What’s the query? Unless it is a real tattoo, in which case it would be why would anyone get a large ugly tattoo of what looks like something reproduced from a printed textbook (no calligraphy or shaded drawings or anything involved), and a kids’ elementary calculus textbook at that.
It’s a line-by-line proof of the famous equation from Euler, e^(i*pi) = -1, using the Taylor series expansions for the exponential function, sine, and cosine. Which is actually a fairly clumsy way to prove it, but I suppose it works.
