Fermi Visits the Big Apple
How many piano tuners are there in NYC?
The Euler-Lagrange Equation
\frac{\partial \mathcal{L}}{\partial q}=\frac{d}{dt}\frac{\partial \mathcal{L}}{\partial \dot{q}}
This theory unites the five superstring theories as limits of a single, eleven-dimensional theory.
What is M-Theory?
Mathematical proofs of this type involve proving a base case and showing that each statement implies the next.
What is (weak) induction?
A member of the First Triumvirate, this figure was beheaded by Ptolemy XIII to appease Julius Caesar, who was in fact enraged.
Who was Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus?
What is bowling?
How many Lydian stater gold coins (8g) would equal the amount of gold stored in the New York Federal Reserve?
9 (5,620 metric tons of gold in NYFR)
Maxwell's Equations
d^2F=0, \quad \star d \star F=J
This man, the first physicist to be awarded the Fields Medal and voted "the smartest living physicist" in 1990, has contributed to all aspects of string theory, including the development of M-Theory, despite not studying physics at college and initially dropping out of graduate school.
Who is Ed Witten?
A deep connection between group theory and polynomials was discovered by this mathematician, who was killed in a dual at the age of 20.
Who was Everiste Galois?
"Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?" were the words that began In Catilinam, a famous speech by this man, who was later beheaded on the orders of Marc Antony for a different series of speeched, called the Philippics.
Who was Marcus Tullius Cicero?
Luck of the Irish is a 2001 Disney Channel Original Movie (DCOM) following Kyle Johnson, a boy who plays this sport, who discovers that he is a leprechaun and must save his family's potato chip fortune by defeating an evil Irish faerie and banishing him to Ohio.
What is basketball?
How many miles do all of the taxi cabs in NYC drive in a day, cumulatively?
6 (13,500 taxis, 70,000 miles per year)
R_{\mu\nu}-\frac{1}{2} g_{\mu\nu}R = \kappa T_{\mu\nu}
These objects are surfaces upon which open string endpoints are confined.
What are D-branes?
This branch of mathematics deals with objects containing elements and morphisms between those elements, functors between objects, and natural transformations between those functors.
What is category theory?
This man's head was removed three years after he died, before being hung on a pike for at least three years, lost, stolen, falsely claimed to have been held by numerous collectors, then ultimately rediscovered and buried.
Oliver Cromwell
Sequel to 1999's Disney Channel Original Movie (DCOM) Horse Sense, about a farm boy who shows his rich, city-slicker cousin the meaning of a hard day's work on their cattle farm in Montana, sees the cousins return, this time on a vacation interrupted by this inconvenience.
What are Australian pirates?
How many windows are in NYC?
8
Dirac's Equation for QED
(i \gamma^\mu \partial_\mu-m)\psi=ie \gamma^\mu A_\mu \psi
The AdS/CFT correspondence is an abbreviation for this.
What is the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence?
This type of object, which has deep ties to geometry, is a fully antisymmetric covariant tensor.
What is a differential form?
This Jacobin, who was behind the beheadings of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, was himself beheaded in 1794.
1999's Disney Channel Original Movie Genius depicts Charlie Boyle living a double life as a genius college student and a dim-witted middle schooler, who uses these to win the big hockey game and his love interest back.
How many shells were set off for Macy's 4th of July Fireworks Celebration in 2022?
4 (1,920 shells per minute, 25 minute show)
Ehrenfest's Theorem
\frac{d}{dt} \langle A \rangle = \frac{2\pi}{ih} \langle [ A _, H ] \rangle + \langle \frac{\partial A}{\partial t} \rangle
The Nambu-Goto action for a string seeks to minimize the area of this surface, which a string traces out over time.
What is the worldsheet?
This theorem states that a subset of the real numbers is compact if and only if it is closed and bounded.
What is the Heine-Borel Theorem?
This fifth wife of King Henry VIII, though perhaps less famous that Anne Boleyn, was also beheaded.
Who was Catherine Howard?
These are the names of the Halloweentown films.
What are Halloweentown, Halloweentown 2: Kalabar's Revenge, Halloweentown High, and Return to Halloweentown?