The Opera House Equation.

When Jorn Utson took on the job of building the opera house he thought he would have to use some sort of complex polynomial to find the curve to make the extraordinary design of the sails stand up. He was several years into the project with major construction well underway and three million in 1960’s dollars in run time gone and did not have a clue how he was going to make it work.

He was in a real bind, when he entered the design completion for he thought they were after a concept building and did not expect to have to build it, let alone out how to do it in the real world and did not expect to win.

On the Sunday morning before the Monday he planned to go in and fess up to the board that he did not know how to do it and resign. He was sitting at his breakfast table peeling an orange and watching the sections drop on the table and not fall over when he realised that it was sections of a sphere he was looking for and not some complex polynomial and was not anywhere near as complicated as he first thought.

He had just skipped over the simple and the obvious, which is the cardinal sin of mathematics. Thinking something must be complicated and rejecting all evidence to the contrary. 

With that in mind it is always worth thinking in terms of simple functions and most importantly checking what everybody else thinks won’t work for the sole reason that they have not done the work required to rigorously test a hypothesis over a long period of time.

In the next section covers how to index the hundred year history of the  All Ords index  into an integer scale using the constant Pi as the base number in place of base ten.

Next in this series The All Ords as a Function of Pi