The Deification of Mathematics

The Economist:

Google constantly leaves numerical puns and riddles for those who care to look in the right places. When it filed the regulatory documents for its stockmarket listing in 2004, it said that it planned to raise $2,718,281,828, which is $e billion to the nearest dollar. A year later, it filed again to sell another batch of shares—precisely 14,159,265, which represents the first eight digits after the decimal in the number pi (3.14159265).

The mathematics comes from the founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The Russian-born Mr Brin is the son of a professor of statistics and probability and a mother who works at NASA; Mr Page is the son of two computer-science teachers. The breakthrough that made their search engine so popular was the realisation that the chaos of the internet had an implicit mathematical order. By counting, weighting and calculating the link structures between web pages, Messrs Page and Brin were able to return search results more relevant than those of any other search engine.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at May 13, 2006 8:06 AM
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