#functionalprogramming

Many people's vote for most #beautiful construct in #math is \[e^{i\pi}+1=0 \].

Yeah, maybe. But I think a close contender (if you include the #CS realm) is \[ \lambda b.\lambda e.eb \].

This serves as the complete #Church encoding of #exponentiation in #LambdaCalculus, driving home subtler points about #function #mapping and ordered pairs and the primacy of exponentiation over add/mult, both of which have uglier #LC representations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus#Arithmetic_in_lambda_calculus

#math #education #school #arithmetic

At risk of pointing out the obvious, here's something that didn't occur to me in these plain terms until last week:

Everyone from little kids on up understands base-10 numbers to one degree or another, and yet decoding place-value #numbers requires using #addition, #multiplication, and #exponentiation in concert.