Author Archives: ramaseshanc96

STORY SO FAR: So last time, we saw that Newton and Galileo believed in the notion and existence of an absolute space (independent of any object) which when witnessing different instants of time, create the stage for every event in this universe to happen. (So every event has a unique location in absolute space independentContinue reading “Week 7: Beginnings of Relativity – 2: Uniform motion in absolute space does not need a cause!”

Mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe Galileo Galilei Many people think it was Einstein who invented relativity. They could never be more wrong. Relativity is a 400 year old tale. It was there since the beginnings of physics. What Einstein did was merely to modify the pre existing model ofContinue reading “Week 6: Beginnings of Relativity – 1: Time and Absolute Space: Newton-Galileo vs Leibnitz-Mach”

Some infinities are bigger than other infinites John Green This week we take a detour from geometry. I was telling you the other kind of geometry that is non-Euclidean and has the feature that given a line and a point not in it, there are many lines passing through the point and parallel to theContinue reading “Week 5: Zeno of Elea: The crazy world of infinities, infinitesimals and limits – Birth of Calculus”

So last time we saw how Euclid’s fifth postulate was deeply influencing many properties of his plane like the ability to scale objects, the equidistance of parallel lines, the sum of interior angles of a triangle being two right angles, the possibility of translating a straight line to another straight line and the existence ofContinue reading “Week 4: Earth is a sphere, where Euclid’s postulates not so dear, and other curiosities…”

“One of Euclid’s postulates—his postulate 5—had the fortune to be an epoch-making statement—perhaps the most famous single utterance in the history of science.” — Cassius J. Keyser The ancient Greeks were the first set of people who formally lifted geometry out of the shabby materialistic real world. Points no longer meant just a dot orContinue reading “Week 3: The Voldemort who no one dared to talk about: Non Euclidean Geometry – Part 1”

In 1637, a silent revolution happened in France. No, I am not talking about the political French Revolution which came much later in 1789. This was a revolution without swords. But neverthless like all great revolutions in histrory, it was to topple the very basic structure of the mind sets of the people of notContinue reading “Week 2: The Revolution of 1637 – The plane of Euclid gets married after 2000 years!!”

It is the glory of geometry that from so few principles, fetched from without, it is able to accomplish so much — Sir Isaac Newton This is the first post on my new blog What are Mathematics and Physics? Mathematics and Physics are tools to explain the world around us. They provide a condensation ofContinue reading “Week 1: Module 1: Geometry Chapter 1: Euclid’s Story”

I am Rama Seshan C, a 23 year old research scholar in the Dept of Electrical Engineering, IIT Madras, Chennai, India. I work in geometric mechanics and control. I am passionate about theoretical physics and hence started this blog. I am broadly interested in Mathematics (focusing on geometry and topology) and Theoretical Physics. Why doContinue reading “About Me”