Is the devil in the details, or...

is God in the math? The math of the universe, that is.

Today marks the 300th anniversary of Leonhard Euler's birth. Who was he? Only one of the top four mathematicians of all time.

NPR had a story on him yesterday:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9585232

He was the one who originally derived what I've always thought of as "the signature of God on the universe."

Here's how WIkipedia describes his "identity formula":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler's_identity

When I was going through the deep math needed to get my professional certification, I actually derived his same identity myself, without realizing that it had been done, oh, about 250 years before me! :) It was actually the first time I ever derived anything mathematical from scratch before, and it was instinctive. I thought about it like this: God wrote his initials on the universe somewhere, and two of the fundamental constants in the universe, pi and e, must be involved somewhere.

So I started playing with them and then stumbled on the idea of involving something paradoxical and mysterious, like God is, and what better concept than the idea of imaginary numbers? Imaginary numbers are something you can't grasp in reality. The idea of taking the square root of a negative number is... impossible. Inconcievable! It's a paradox. Unreal. It has to be imaginary. And yet... it's what ties everything together and makes a lot of the higher math that describes the universe possible.

Just like God to infuse reality with mystery, and to keep defining Himself just out of our reach.

I love Euler's identity. Not because I came up with it independently, but because..

It's God's signature on the original art that is the universe.