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Famous Theories

From a theory of incompleteness to how to pack spheres in a box: this week we feature ten of the most famous theories in modern history.

Posted by Tormod Guldvog
13 September, 2001 04:09:29

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Most of us have heard about these theories, or at least some of them. But although they may be famous, they are not necessarily easy to understand.

Take Kepler's Conjecture, for example. It simply states that there is an ultimate way to pack spheres into a box. It has taken centuries of experiments and calculations to show that there are in fact an endless number of ways to do it - and scientists have yet to prove that there is one way which is better than the others.

Another great idea is Drake's Equation, which is meant to show that there is a good possibility that there are aliens out there. It is perhaps the least scientific of all the ideas we feature below, but it is also much easier to understand than the rest.

Not to mention Fermat's Last Theorem, of course, which haunted mathematicians for ages until it was finally proven in the 1990s.

If you would like to suggest further theories for this list, feel free to tell the editor!

Related Links

Fermat's last theorem
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/HistTopics/Fermat's_last_theorem.html
A presentation of one of the most famous theorems ever solved.

The Equivalence of Mass and Energy
http://library.thinkquest.org/3471/energy_mass_equivalence.html
ThinkQuest has a page which shows how Einstein derived his famous equation e=mc2.

Continuum Hypothesis
http://www.best.com/~ii/math/ch/
A detailed presentation of the continuum hypothesis, which implies that there is an endless amount of real numbers in the world

The Kepler Conjecture
http://www.math.lsa.umich.edu/~hales/countdown/
This is the classic problem of packing spheres into a box, a problem which recently was claimed to have been solved.

Newton's Universal Law of Gravitation
http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/history/newtongrav.html
This is one of the fundamental laws of modern mathematics. It describes the forces bodies exert upon each other, that is, how gravity works.

Faraday's Law of Induction
http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Teaching/Courses/EFT/dynamics/html/faradayslaw.html
Faraday's law describes how an electric field can be induced by a changing magnetic flux.

Entropy
http://www.britannica.com/seo/e/entropy/
The equation for entropy, or the amount of disorder in a system, was formulated by the German physicist Rudolf Clausius in 1850.

Bernoulli's Equation
http://physics.bu.edu/py105/notes/Bernoulli.html
This equation is used to calculate fluid dynamics, that is, the motion, turbulence, pressure, and flow, of fluids.

The Drake Equation
http://www.activemind.com/Mysterious/Topics/SETI/drake_equation.html
This equation is an attempt to show the probability for life in the Universe.

Godel on the net
http://www.sm.luth.se/~torkel/eget/godel.html
This is a collection of comments on various aspects of Godel's incompleteness theorem