Equator

In A&P lecture the other day, which I sometimes enjoy attending because of the remote control quiz show aspect of the class wherein the prof posts questions on the screen and we all frantically click the answers in with our little devices, which satisfies my need for competitive academics and trivia, the prof was discussing memory and mentioned that short term memory does not last, which is why nobody remembers the quadratic equation. Um, what? Why would we not remember that? It was among my first major equations, exciting on the same level as discovering boys. It was so perfect, so....leading to answers. I'll go so far as to say it was a spiritual experience for me, which in a small school in a small town was hard to come by, academically speaking.

So then I spent the rest of the lecture lost in thought, musing on favorite equations. There are so many I really like, even love, that it would be hard to choose only one. It's like elements of the periodic table, or your children, or sandwiches---hard to choose a favorite and depends on the day. Though most days for me it's carbon, both/neither, and hot: Reuben; cold: veggie bagel sandwich from Fulbeli Deli.  I mean, carbon--it's so versatile. Sigh. I mean, what else can be used for dating ancient materials, organizing societies into bloody and brutal hierarchies with its compressed form, fuel industry, and take the truncated icosahedral shape of buckminsterfullerene ? And nobody ever talks about boron-based life forms, or neoniferous materials (all due respect to the inert gases, yo).

I may have just gone a little off topic there. I have no small amount of passion for the periodic table of elements. This would be a good place for me to admit that I am planning to have my cousin to paint a portrait of the PT of E for me, to hang on my wall. Way more satisfying than pastoral scene shit.

Back to my favorite equation. As I mentioned before, the quadratic equation holds a special place in my heart, and then of course there's Bernoulli's principle , which I've always taken a moment to appreciate when traveling. Schr⦱dinger's ideas  and I go way back, and then there's always a little love for the universal gas law and its sidekick, partial pressures. It's hard not to shout out to the classic E=mc², but that's overused to the point of being precious, even though I doubt somehow that most people really appreciate the elegance in relating an object's mass to its energy, with all the attendant nods to electromagnetic force and gravity and the potential bending of time and space. Rock on.

With equations come constants, and my favorites of those are probably Planck's constant (life-changing constant for me in 1996) and the speed of light. And of course no discussion of constants would be complete without pi, my favorite irrational number of all time.