/sci/ - Science & Math

I have to say that /sci/ has been incredibly beneficial to me. I started out, barely having taken any algebra (elementary, not abstract), and I saw people on /sci/ talking about things I had no idea about.

I decided to take extra math classes in college, and I'm getting to the point where I understand a lot more. I'll end up at least minoring, which was a huge step from where I was.

Anyway, today at the end of my Calc 2 class, we were discussing series substitutions, and my professor discussed how they use a function with pi as an answer (like arctangent) and use that to calculate the value of pi. We also discussed Euler's work with the complex plane and the e^ix function being sines and cosines when written in series form.

I was blown away, and felt like I had learned something that was incredibly interesting. If you guys could, I'd like to hear stories or instances where you were blown away or astonished. It doesn't have to be math, but just cool things that make you realize just how cool some knowledge can be.

It's good if you come up with good question which can be answered.
But at the same time you bring forward an non-positivistic picture of the world and for me I don't see the merit - there are enough things to learn for me, even when taking the concise approach. For now I don't want to make things more complicated than they already are.

>The practice of science has become almost a religion, in which we must accept what we are taught as absolute truth.
No, why? You can do what you want. But what sure happened is that the fields drift more apart as they specialize and you don't get to talk other peoples languages more easily.

I also would not so easily paint a black picture of the current situation - you don't really know how it was before, much of history is deleted, mostly that which worked survived.

I don't think the courses taken are a good indicator.
My masters was on the relation between Poisson and Riemannian geometry, I now work in computational plasma chemistry, the focus of my private life in the last year was on foundations of mathematics - but I never took a class in any of those subjects.

So I need some good documentaries to watch. I'm just in the mood, you know? I'm thinking something spacey that will make me wonder for days about all the possibilities. But anything will do if it is interesting.

Suggestions?