/sci/ - Science & Math

Can we have a thread sharing brainlet stories relating to chemistry?

I have an inorganic chemistry exam tomorrow, and I was in lab and decided to pop quiz one of my friends next to me and asked them to recite the type of metal and its ligands for Wilkanson's catalyst which is something we need to know for the exam. He didn't even know that Wilkanson's catalyst was a thing, so I figured maybe he forgot that Wilkanson was the name of the complex. Fine, so I ask him what's the metal we use for the symmetrical hydrogenation catalysis reaction we need to know for the exam. At this point shit takes a turn for the worse. He responds with bromine. Fucking. Bromine. How could you possibly be a senior in chemistry and be under the impression that bromine was a transition metal? His next guess is almost as bad, he asked if it the metal was magnesium. I mean seriously? Do you not know how the periodic table is grouped and why it's grouped in such a way? Magnesium can form a maximum of two bonds, meaning it is utterly incapable of hydrogenation, even without all the non-reacting ligands necessary to stabilize the complex. I just cannot comprehend how he's absorbed literally nothing from the class in the past two months.

Does pi look any different in base n numbering (where n = all natural numbers except 10)?

ITT:
>go to simple.wikipedia.org
>find an article on a STEM subject matter
>post quotes

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Heisenberg did not make the grids like this. He just did the math that would let him get the intensities he was looking for. But to do that he had to multiply two amplitudes (how high a wave measures) to work out the intensity. (In classical physics, intensity equals amplitude squared.) He made an odd-looking equation to handle this problem, wrote out the rest of his paper, handed it to his boss, and went on vacation. Dr. Born looked at his funny equation and it seemed a little crazy. He must have wondered, "Why did Heisenberg give me this strange thing? Why does he have to do it this way?" Then he realized that he was looking at a blueprint for something he already knew very well. He was used to calling the grid or table that we could write by doing, for instance, all the math for frequencies, a matrix. And Heisenberg's weird equation was a rule for multiplying two of them together. Max Born was a very, very good mathematician. He knew that since the two matrices (grids) being multiplied represented different things (like position (x,y,z) and momentum (mv), for instance), then when you multiply the first matrix by the second you get one answer and when you multiply the second matrix by the first matrix you get another answer. Even though he did not know about matrix math, Heisenberg already saw this "different answers" problem and it had bothered him. But Dr. Born was such a good mathematician that he saw that the difference between the first matrix multiplication and the second matrix multiplication was always going to involve Planck's constant, h, multiplied by the square root of negative one, i.