Euler's formula with introductory group theory

Key Takeaways

two years ago almost to the day actually I put up the first video on this channel about Oilers Formula E to the pi IAL -1 as an anniversary of sorts I want to revisit that same idea for one thing I've always kind of wanted to improve on the presentation but I wouldn't rehash an old topic if there wasn't something new to teach you see the idea underlying that video was to take certain Concepts from a field in math called group Theory and show how they give Oilers formula a much richer interpretation than a mere association between numbers and two years ago I thought it might be fun to use those ideas without referencing group Theory itself or any of the technical terms within it but I've come to see that you all actually quite like getting into the math itself even if it takes some time so here 2 years later let's you and me go through an introduction to the basics of group Theory building up to how Oilers formula comes to life under this light if all you want is a quick explanation of Oilers formula and if you're comfortable with Vector calculus I'll go ahead and put up a particularly short explanation on the screen that you can pause and Ponder on if it doesn't make sense don't worry about it it's not needed for where we're going the reason that I want to put out this group Theory view though is not because I think it's a better explanation heck it's not even a complete proof it's just an intuition really it's because it has the chance to change how you think about numbers and how you think about algebra you see group theory is all about studying the nature of symmetry for example a square is a very symmetric shape but what do we actually mean by that one way to answer that is to ask about what are all the actions you can take on the Square that leave it looking indistinguishable from how it started for example you could rotate at 90° counterclockwise and it looks totally the same to how it started you could also flip it around this vertical line and again it still looks identical in fact the thing about such perfect symmetry is that it's hard to keep track of what action has actually been taken so to help out I'm going to go ahead and stick on an asymmetric image here now we call each one of these actions a symmetry of the square and all of the symmetries together make up a group of symmetries or just group for short this particular group consists of eight symmetry there's the action of doing nothing which is one that we count plus three different rotations and then there's four ways that you can flip it over and in fact this group of eight symmetries has a special name it's called the dihedral group of order eight and that's an example of a finite group consisting of only eight actions but a lot of other groups consist of infinitely many actions think of all possible rotations for example of any angle maybe you think of this is a group that acts on a circle capturing all of the symmetries of that Circle that don't involve flipping it here every action from this group of rotation lies somewhere on the infinite Continuum between 0 and 2 pi radians one nice aspect of these actions is that we can associate each one of them with a single point on the circle itself the thing being acted on you start by choosing some arbitrary point maybe the one on the right here then every Circle symmetry every possible rotation takes this marked point to some unique spot on the circle and the action itself is completely determined by where it takes that spot now this doesn't always happen with groups but it's nice when it does happen CU it gives us a way to label the actions themselves which can otherwise be pretty tricky to think about the study of groups is not just a about what a particular set of symmetries is whether that's the eight symmetries of a square the infinite Continuum of symmetries of the circle or anything else you dream up the real heart and soul of the study is knowing how these symmetries play with each other on the Square if I rotate 90° and then flip around the vertical axis the overall effect is the same as if I had just flipped over this diagonal line so in some sense that rotation plus the ver vertical flip equals that diagonal flip on the circle if I rotate 270° and then follow it with a rotation of 120° the overall effect is the same as if I hadj just rotated 30° to start with so in this circle group a 270° rotation plus a 120° rotation equals a 30° rotation and in general with any group any collection of these sorts of symmetric actions there's a kind of arithmetic where you can always take two actions and add them together to get a third one by applying one after the other or maybe you think of it as multiplying actions it doesn't really matter the point is that there is some way to combine the two actions to get out another one that collection of underlying relations all associations between Pairs of actions and the single action that's equivalent to applying one after the other that's really what makes a group a group it's actually crazy how much of modern math is rooted in in well this in understanding how a collection of actions is organized by this relation this relation between Pairs of actions and the single action you get by composing them groups are extremely General a lot of different ideas can be framed in terms of symmetries and composing symmetries and maybe the most familiar example is numbers just ordinary numbers and there are actually two separate ways to think about numbers as a group one where composing actions is going to look like addition and another where composing actions will look like multiplication it's a little weird because we don't usually think of numbers as actions we usually think of them as counting things but let me show you what I mean think of all of the ways that you can slide a number line left or right along itself this collection of all sliding actions is a group what you might think of as the group of symmetries on an infinite line and in the same way that actions from the Circle Group could be associated with individual points on that Circle this is another one of those special groups where we can associate each action with a unique point on the thing that it's actually acting on you just follow where the point that starts at zero ends up for example the number three is associated with the action of sliding right by three units the number -2 is associated with the action of sliding two units to the left since that's the unique action that drags the point at zero over to the point at -2 the number zero itself well that's associated with the action of just doing nothing this group of sliding actions each one of which is associated with a unique real number has a special name the additive group of real numbers the reason the word additive is in there is because of what the group operation of applying one action followed by another looks like if I slide right by three units and then I slide right by two units the overall effect is the same as if I slid right by 3 + 2 or five units simple enough we're just adding the distances of each slide but the point here is that this gives an alternate view for what numbers even are they are one example in a much larger category of groups groups of symmetries acting on some object and the arithmetic of adding numbers is just one example of the arithmetic that any group of symmetries has within it we could also extend this idea instead asking about the sliding actions on the complex plane the newly introduced numbers I 2 I 3 I and so on on this vertical line would all be associated with vertical sliding motions since those are the action that drag the point at zero up to the relevant point on that vertical line the point over here at 3 + 2 I would be associated with the action of sliding the plane in such a way that drag zero up and to the right to that point and it should make sense why we call this 3 + 2i that diagonal sliding action is the same as first sliding by three to the right and then following it with a slide that corresponds to 2 I which is two units vertically similarly let's get a feel for how composing any two of these actions generally breaks down consider this Slide by 3 + 2i action as well as this Slide by 1us 3i action and imagine applying one of them right after the other the overall effect the composition of these two sliding actions is the same as if we had slid 3 + 1 to the right and 2us 3 vertically notice how that involves adding together each component so composing sliding actions is another way to think about what adding complex numbers actually means this collection of all sliding actions on the 2D complex plane goes by the name the additive group of complex numbers again the upshot here is that numbers even complex numbers are just one example of a group and the idea of addition can be thought of in terms of successively applying actions but numbers schizophrenic as they are also lead a completely different life as a completely different kind of group consider a new group of actions on the number line all ways that you can stretch or squish it keeping everything evenly spaced and keeping that number zero fixed in place yet again this group of actions has that nice property where we can associate each action in the group with a specific point on the thing that it's acting on in this case follow where the point that starts at the number one goes there is one and only one stretching action that brings that point at one to the point at three for instance namely stretching by a factor of three likewise there is one and only one action that brings that point at one to the point at 1/2 namely squishing by a factor of 1/2 I like to imagine using one hand to fix the number zero in place and using the other to drag the number one wherever I like while the rest of the number line just does whatever it takes to stay evenly spaced in this way every single positive number is associated with a unique stretching or squishing Action Now notice what composing actions looks like in this group if I apply the stretch by three action and then follow it with the stretch by two action the overall effect is the same as if I had just applied the stretch by six action the product of the two original numbers and in general applying one of these actions followed by another corresponds with multiplying the numbers that they're associated with in fact the name for this group is the multiplicative group of positive real numbers so multiplication ordinary familiar multiplication is one more example of this very general and very far-reaching idea of groups and the arithmetic within groups and we can also extend this idea to the complex plane again I like to think of fixing zero in place with one hand and dragging around the point at one keeping everything else evenly spaced while I do so but this time as we drag the number one to places that are off the real number line we see that our group includes not only stretching and squishing actions but actions that have some rotational component as well the quintessential example of this is the action associated with that point at I one unit above zero what it takes to drag the point at one to that point at I is a 90° rotation so the multiplicative action associated with I is a 90° rotation and notice if I apply that action twice in a row the overall effect is to flip the plane 180° and that is the unique action that brings the point at one over to 1 so in this sense I * IAL 1 meaning the action associated with I followed by that same action associated with I has the same overall effect as the action associated with -1 as another example here's the action associated with 2 + I dragging one up to that point if you want you could think of this as broken down as a rotation by 30° followed by a stretch by a factor ofare < TK of 5 and in general every one of these multiplicative actions is some combination of a stretch or a squish an action associated with some point on the positive real number line followed by a pure rotation where pure rotations are associated with points on this circle the one with radius one this is very similar to how the sliding actions in the additive group could be broken down as some pure horizontal slide represented with points on the real number line plus some purely vertical slide represented with points on that vertical line that comparison of how actions in each group breaks down is going to be important so remember it in each one you can break down any action as some purely real number action followed by something that's specific to complex numbers whether that's vertical slides for the add group or pure rotations for the multiplicative group so that's our quick introduction to groups a group is a collection of symmetric actions on some mathematical object whether that's a square or a circle the real number line or anything else you dream up and every group has a certain arithmetic where you can combine two actions by applying one after the other and asking what other action from the group gives the same overall effect numbers both real and complex numbers can be thought of in two different ways as a group they can act by sliding in which case the group arithmetic just looks like ordinary addition or they can act by these stretching squishing rotating actions in which case the group arithmetic looks just like multiplication and with that let's talk about exponentiation our first introduction to exponents is to think think of them in terms of repeated multiplication right I mean the meaning of something like 2 cubed is to take 2 * 2 * 2 and the meaning of something like 2 5th is 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 and a consequence of this something you might call the exponential property is that if I add two numbers in the exponent say 2 3 + 5 this can be broken down as the product of 2 3r * 2 5 and when you expand things this seems reasonable enough right but expressions like 2 to the 1/2 or 2 to the1 and much less 2 to the I don't really make sense when you think of exponents as repeated multiplication I mean what does it mean to multiply two by itself half of a time or negative one of a time so we do something very common throughout math and extend beyond the original definition which only makes sense for counting numbers to something that applies Li to all sorts of numbers but we don't just do this randomly if you think back to how fractional and negative exponents are defined it's always motivated by trying to make sure that this property 2 x + y = 2 x * 2 y still holds to see what this might mean for complex exponents think about what this property is saying from a group Theory like it's saying that adding the inputs corresponds with multiplying the outputs and that makes it very tempting to think of the inputs not merely as numbers but as members of the additive group of sliding actions and to think of the outputs not merely as numbers but as members of this multiplicative group of stretching and squishing actions now it is weird and strange to think about functions that take in one kind of action and spit out another kind of action but this is something that actually comes up all the time throughout group Theory and this exponential property is very important for this association between groups it guarantees that if I compose two sliding actions maybe a slide by negative - 1 and then a slide by positive2 it corresponds to composing the two output actions in this case squishing by 2 to the 1 and then stretching by 2^ 2ar mathematicians would describe a property like this by saying that the function preserves the group structure in the sense that the arithmetic within a group is what gives it its structure and a function like this exponential plays nicely with that arithmetic functions between groups that preserve the arithmetic like this are really important throughout group Theory enough so that they've earned themselves a nice fancy name homomorphisms now think about what all of this means for associating the additive group in the complex plane with the multiplicative group in the complex plane we already know that when you plug in a real number to 2 the X you get out a real number a positive real number in fact so this exponential function takes any purely horizontal slide and turns it into some pure stretching or squishing action so wouldn't you agree that it would be reasonable for this new dimension of additive actions slides up and down to map directly into this new dimension of multiplicative actions pure rotations those vertical sliding actions correspond to points on this vertical axis and those rotating multiplicative actions correspond to points on the circle with radius one so what it would mean for an exponential function like 2 the X to map purely vertical slides into pure rotations would be that complex numbers on this vertical line multiples of I get mapped to comple comp Lex numbers on this unit circle in fact for the function 2 the X the input I a vertical slide of one unit happens to map to a rotation of about 0.693 radians that is a walk around the unit circle that covers 0.693 units of distance with a different exponential function say 5 to the x that input I a vertical slide of one unit would map to a rotation of about 1.609 radians a walk around the unit circle covering exactly 1.609 units of distance what makes the number e special is that when the exponential e to the X Maps vertical slides to rotations a vertical slide of one unit corresponding to I maps to a rotation of exactly one radian a walk around the unit circle covering a distance of exactly one and so a vertical slide of two units would map to a rotation of two radians a 3unit slide up corresponds to a rotation of three radians and a vertical slide of exactly Pi units up corresponding to the input Pi * I maps to a rotation of exactly Pi radians halfway around the circle and that's the multiplicative action associated with the number1 now you might ask why e why not some other base well the full answer resides in calculus I mean that's the birthplace of e and where it's even defined again I'll leave up another explanation on the screen if you're hungry for a fuller description and if you're comfortable with the calculus but at a high level I'll say that it has to do with the fact that all exponential functions are proportional to their own derivative but e to the X alone is the one that's actually equal to its own derivative the important point that I want to make here though is that if you view things from the lens of group Theory thinking of the inputs to an exponential function as sliding actions and thinking of the outputs as stretching and rotating actions it gives a very Vivid way to read what a formula like this is even saying when you read it you can think that exponentials in general map purely vertical slides the additive actions that are perpendicular to the real number line into pure rotations which are in some sense perpendicular to the real number stretching actions and moreover e to the X does this in the very special way that ensures that a vertical slide of Pi units corresponds to a rotation of exactly Pi radians the 180° rotation associated with the number1 to finish things off here I want to show a way that you can think about this function e to the X as a transformation of the complex plane but before that just two quick messages I've mentioned before just how thankful I am to you the community for making these videos possible through patreon but in much the same way that numbers become more meaningful when you think of them as actions gratitude is also best expressed as an action so I've decided to turn off ads on new videos for their first month in the hopes of giving you all a better viewing experience this video was sponsored by Emerald Cloud lab and actually I was the one to reach out to them on this one since it's a company I find particularly inspiring Emerald is a very unusual startup half software half biotech the cloud lab that they're building essentially enables biologists and chemists to conduct research through a software platform instead of working in a lab scientists can program experiments which are then executed remotely and robotically in Emerald's industrialized research lab I know some of the people at the company and the software challenges they're working on are really interesting currently they're looking to hire software engineers and web Developers for their engineering team as well as applied mathematicians and computer scientists for their scientific Computing team if you're interested in applying whether that's now or a few months from now there are a couple special links in the description of this video and if you apply through those it lets Emerald know that you heard about them through this Channel all right so e to the X transforming the plane I like to imagine first rolling that plane into a cylinder wrapping all those vertical lines into circles and then taking that cylinder and kind of smooshing it onto the plane around zero where each of those concentric circles spaced out exponentially correspond with what started off as vertical lines [Music] [Music]