Beautiful Proofs(#3): Area under a sine curve !

June 7, 2017June 9, 2017 / 153armstrong / Leave a comment

So, I read this post on the the area of the sine curve some time ago and in the bottom was this equally amazing comment :

Screenshot from 2017-06-07 00:19:11

$\sum sin(\theta)d\theta =$ Diameter of the circle/ The distance covered along the x axis starting from $0$ and ending up at $\pi$ .

And therefore by the same logic, it is extremely intuitive to see why:

$\int\limits_{0}^{2\pi} sin/cos(x) dx = 0$

Because if a dude starts at $0$ and ends at $0/ 2\pi/ 4\pi \hdots$ , the effective distance that he covers is 0.

If you still have trouble understanding, follow the blue point in the above gif and hopefully things become clearer.

nth roots of unity : A geometric approach

June 6, 2017June 6, 2017 / 153armstrong / Leave a comment

When one is dealing with complex numbers, it is many a times useful to think of them as transformations. The problem at hand is to find the nth roots of unity. i.e

$z^n = 1$

Multiplication as a Transformation

Multiplication in the complex plane is mere rotation and scaling. i.e

$z_{1} = r_{1}e^{i\theta_{1}}, z_{2} = r_{2}e^{i\theta_{2}}$

$z_{1}z_{2} = \underbrace{r_{1} r_{2}}_{scaling} \underbrace{e^{i(\theta_{1} + \theta_{2})}}_{rotation}$

Now what does finding the n roots of unity mean?

If you start at 1 and perform n equal rotations( because multiplication is nothing but rotation + scaling ), you should again end up at 1.

We just need to find the complex numbers that do this.i.e

$z^n = 1$

$\underbrace{zz \hdots z}_{n} = 1$

$z = re^{i\theta}$

$r^{n}e^{i(\theta + \theta + \hdots \theta)} = 1e^{2\pi k i}$

$r^{n}e^{in\theta} =1e^{2\pi k i}$

This implies that :

$\theta = \frac{2\pi k}{n}, r = 1$

And therefore :

$z = e^{\frac{2\pi k i}{n}}$

Take a circle, slice it into n equal parts and voila you have your n roots of unity.

Okay, but what does this imply ?

Multiplication by 1 is a $360^o/0^o$ rotation.

drawing

When you say that you are multiplying a positive real number(say 1) with 1 , we get a number(1) that is on the same positive real axis.

Multiplication by (-1) is a $180^o$ rotation.

drawing-1

When you multiply a positive real number (say 1) with -1, then we get a number (-1) that is on the negative real axis

The act of multiplying 1 by (-1) has resulted in a 180^o transformation. And doing it again gets us back to 1.

Multiplication by $i$ is a $90^o$ rotation.

drawing-2

Similarly multiplying by i takes 1 from real axis to the imaginary axis, which is a 90^o rotation.

This applies to -i as well.

That’s about it! – That’s what the nth roots of unity mean geometrically. Have a good one!