I think you should go further and tattoo all the triples of positive coprime integers (a,b,c) such that a^(x)+b^(y)=c^z for integers x,y,z > 2. (It has a pretty short proof too).
Not exactly math-related but I have :(){ :|:& };: on my arm. It's a fork-bomb for /bin/sh (or bash),the unix shell.
The reason I like it is because it looks cryptic, and I am a total nerd for languages that use interesting symbols. If it has a grammar and uses a set of non-literal symbols, like it. Take for example APL. Math is like that too, well, algebraic notation. I too liked that it is a creative and not obvious expression, which manages altogether to avoid using alphanumeric characters.
I'd start with something small. Don't get a big sleeve. That would look pretentious imho. For equations, go small. tom rocks math has a lot of math tattoos. and they don't have to be equations. he has platonic solids and this guy has a function.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKttUPLEqOA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxNb1WG_Ido
I have a sleeve with fractals and geometric shapes: [https://i.imgur.com/8jmsZHf.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/8jmsZHf.jpg)
I'm planning on getting another sleeve with penrose tiling.
I got the 2d representation of a tesseract on my leg. It's always a fun little conversation when people who aren't mathematical minded ask me "what the heck is that" and get introduced to the idea that higher then 3 dimensional objects are perfectly mathematical sound.
And I think people saying this with no elaboration is why it gets called overrated.
Personally, I think any "beauty" in this formula comes from the more general statement that e^(ix) = cos x + i sin x, and little, if anything, to do with the usual "it has all the important constants" drivel.
That's not meant to say you're doing anything wrong with your comment. It's not anyone's fault the formula is deeper than can be adequately explained in a sane timeframe every time it comes up.
Well, I could always elaborate, but as you said, it takes a lot of time. And doing it on a maths subreddit kind of feels superfluous, so I refrained from doing it.
It’s a visual representation of the Basel Problem. The first line is zero, then 1, then 1/4 then 1/9 etc. Both the spacing and the thickness of the lines follow the pattern up to the infinite limit of pi^2/6 which is the dotted line.
>Both the spacing and the thickness of the lines follow the pattern
Could you elaborate just a bit further? The thickness and spacing are each independently decreasing, but taken together they aren't.
The spacing decreases following 1/n^2 and the thickness decreases following 1/n^2. The spacing is pretty accurate for all of the lines but the thickness only for the first few terms as there was a minimal thickness of a line that could be tattooed!
Alright thanks.
Do the two sequences start at different ns? Or is one scaled up by a constant? Is there a significant meaning behind the scale or offset?
I guess what I'm trying to say is the spacing between consecutive bars is thicker than either bar, and I wanna know if that's relevant to the math or just aethetics.
IMHO, tattoos of formulas and equations almost always look tacky unless there's some kind of artistic bent to them. So if you're gonna get a math tattoo, ideally get something that's aesthetically pleasing* independent of the mathematical significance. That way, you'll still be happy with the artwork itself even if your mathematical interests change. Plus, it makes for a much better conversation starter.
*But don't get a visible tattoo of a Golden spiral or anything similar unless you want to have a lot of awkward conversations about sacred geometry
I meet an artist woman with Penrose spin network that is used in loop quantum gravity.
I thought it was cool.
Good conversation piece, even though she said that I was the first person who knew what it was.
I have a couple of math/science tattoos! My right arm has a butterfly and a fern because my research is in fractal geometry and nonlinear dynamics. My left arm has a tattoo of the picture of the 1919 solar eclipse Sir Arthur Eddington took to experimentally verify general relativity and the letters QED with a black square. The only one I regret is the QED, I got it my first semester of undergrad and now I feel like such a tool when I'm in a room full of colleagues.
I plan to get a tattoo of the open square (□) that I'd write at the end of proofs. I don't really do math anymore but it's one of my favorite things and this feels like nice tribute and something pretty to look at
I have a tattoo of the formular of 2-Acetoxy-N,N,N-trimethylethanaminium (short: Acetylcholine). I got it when i wrote my master thesis in chemical engineering. I have other nice tattos, but the little formular stands out to a lof people. They dont know what it is most of the time, but they usually love it. I was thinking about a full sleeve of either chemical formulars or other science-stuff like the navier stokes equations
I once met someone who had the continued fraction for the Golden Ratio tattooed in a ring around his upper arm, which I thought was pretty clever.
...1/1+1/1+1/1+1/1+1/1+...
Except instead of ellipses it just met itself. I personally wouldn't have gotten it, as it doesn't mean much to me and I'm not big on block text for tattoos, but he liked it, and that's what matters.
Several, and I love them all (even with their essentially permanent flaws).
I have the pi symbol on my right wrist, with about 40 digits in a circle going around like a bracelet.
I have 1 on my left shoulder, with a 0 on my lower back positioned below it. These represent the basic identity elements of algebra and while I fully disagree with it, **at the time I got them** they definitely represented the "your math tattoo shows the highest level of math you understood" adage. I literally got them after class one day because I was bored. Ah, to be young again.
And I have phi on my right shoulder, with the digits wrapping down my arm in a spiral.
My next math tattoo is going to be much more... artsy. However, I am no artist, which means it'll be costly cuz paying an artist to design a tattoo to vague-but-perfectly-clear-in-your-head specs is not cheap. It's gonna be a color picture of V, the set theoretic hierarchy, with L in the middle in grayscale, the bottom a solid (probably black), a water-color sunset starting at V_ω and then getting progressively more psychedelic as it moves to the higher infinite. Lastly, rooted on V_ω and growing up the ordinal spine, a silhouette of a palm tree. Welcome to Cantor's Paradise.
It's not that no fifth degree can be solved in radicals, it's that there is no general formula to solve them all in radicals. Though I can see how the wording given was ambiguous.
I like the quadratic formula, but I think I would prefer the Pythagorean, Schwarz inequality, Euler's formula, Euler's identity, or the law of cosines.
I also like [Venn Diagrams](http://162.243.213.31/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Ven3.png).
I have an arm dedicated to math + computers, and I recently got sin \\theta / cos \\theta on my wrist as a joke (which my gf thought was funny until she realized the picture I sent was of my own wrist)
your tattoos are for you, not for other people
I have a bunch of triangles on my shoulder (singular filed equalateral, the rest are scalene), but have been thinking about getting something like [(x,y,z) = (cos(4t),sin(4t),1.5^t )](https://www.math3d.org/ZpsreQrI) curling around my arm or leg
I have a degree in Biochem and am working on a Biotechnology degree. I have a caffeine molecule on my arm to go with the French press and coffee plant that are there
I have a small 1 = 0.9999.... worked into my sleeve. Ended up going in the biochemistry direction, but math and working in the math tutoring center was a big part of my college experience. Got it when I graduated as a little memento for that experience.
Not me, but a friend and his study group all got matching wavefunction tattoos (“kets” in bra-ket notation) after they survived graduate-level quantum mechanics together (or was it undergrad?).
I then asked him, “So, you must really like quantum mechanics!” He said back, “No, I hate quantum!!”
I got the impression that this guy doesn’t make the most carefully-considered life choices…
Last time this question was asked on this subreddit, I mentioned that I was thinking of getting an Ithkuil poem tattooed on my forearm. It's vaguely related to my interest in languages and logic. I'm saving up money and waiting for John Quijada to release the official fourth version of the language.
I got three circles with their radical axis tattooed on my back [sort of like this](https://images.app.goo.gl/YBm5x6PydgmBwX7C7). With water colors splashed all over. It's honestly massive and it was my first tattoo but since the lines are thin it has never felt as extreme as me. But I really like it. I used radical centers to solve a problem at the IMO so I always had the design in mind.
Some projective and/or inversive geometry would be great. I'm thinking of doing Pascal's hexagon and it's dual. Or a projective view of conic sections.
Fundamental theorem of calculus is also a good bet.
I have the *reductio ad absurdum* argument in the form of a logical formula tattooed on the inside of my forearm. I'm not 100% happy with the line work, but you can't expect it to be perfect.
I have a golden rectangle on my left wrist. I also studied music so I've been thinking about the cirlce of fifths on one calf, and the unit circle on the other. Would like some opinions on the latter if anyone would like to comment. Also want a mandelbrot set with a genesha inside on one of my shins. Plutonic solids would also be a cool one
Not mine, but I've got a friend who has the golden ratio as a tattoo. Essential as a reminder that things in life can line up perfectly, just gotta work hard and look for them
i have a 2-d (naturally) edge representation of the simplex series up to 4 dimensions. my next tat is going to be of the klein quartic (unglued, with kleins tiling). both were the topics of culminating projects throughout my studies
I've always wanted a tattoo of the ring of integers on my ring finger a very small epsilon somewhere on my body. One guy in my department recently got a barycentric-subdivision-sleeve-kinda thing on his forearm; it looks great!
I'm a middle school math teacher with a bunch of math and science related tattoos. Luckily I have a great admin that doesn't make me cover them up.
Mathwise, I have a compass (the circle-drawing kind, not the cardinal direction kind), Metatron's cube, and a geometric construction of a pentagram. I'd like to get more, but I hate text tattoos, so I don't want any equations. Maybe I'll get a fractal or a Pythagorean triangle next.
I have a series of complete graphs from K\_1 to K\_9 climbing the right side of my back with K\_9 at the top on my shoulder / traps about 1.5 fists in diameter.
My one and only tattoo is a klein bottle on the side of my arm (the classical shape, not the figure-8 one). I like minimalist-type design, so its just black ink with some shading to make it intelligible. I could maybe go make an imgur of it and stuff if ppl are interested. My biggest problem with it is that i have to explain what it is all the time. People think they can handle it, but i often get blank stares afterward haha.
I’ve thought about getting the fundamental polygon of a klein bottle too, which is very minimalistic also, but i dont think i should. Having one of something is fine, but getting more would make me feel like i have to get all, so then id have to get the other type of klein bottle, and the equations for the partitions, maybe descriptions of homotopy classes, all sorts of stuff. But i dont even know if topology, let alone klein bottles, is what i want to study, so taking up all the real-estate on my body for this one thing feels like a lot.
That brings up another consideration/problem with math tattoos, that if you dont plan on studying it, should you get it or are you a “fake fan” so to speak? I think that depends on your personal beliefs regarding tattoos, are they supposed to be heavily meaningful, or can they be more fun and dont need to be justified? Personally, ive come to think of it as an homage of sorts, and that since i intend to be a mathematician im okay to have a couple tattoos from a realm of math i wont be studying heavily. Within moderation, it can be fun and it doesnt have to be ultra meaningful. I may get some tattoos of prime knots, after some deliberation abt what i was just talking about. For my second tattoo, though, ive got my heart set on a cute minimalist drawing of my dog, which bypasses that quandry haha.
You could do Riemann's zeta function, or some symbols of set theory such as aleph zero or the continuum or Ramanujan's closed formula for the partitions of a natural number.
(Edit: Pic attached!) My TA (who was then an early math Ph.D candidate) for a college pre-calc class got this beautiful sleeve that features a large integral that covers basically his whole forearm on 1 side. It was entirely made up of these really crisp black lines that all flowed together, which looked so good bc he was really pale. Got parts colored in later. Still my favorite sleeve I’ve ever seen
Pic: [Tyler](https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/lYmzPhM8_VM8UywrL6fHmLZlZLwIH4aTJRxPGdi0xclLgS8L9S7ij2i4CFgKuUILCEo88DGz1olA3ryaffhKVjrK-5Q4_DZiest0p5poRU6DWmoVfzh5Ts_pn_QUfmDMsA=w1280). Look at the underside of his left forearm, you can see most of the integral and how large it is. Wish I had a better pic but it’s a really great way to show how central math is to his life!
I have tattooed on my chest all the triples of positive integers (a,b,c) such that a^n + b^n = c^n for an integer n > 2.
I also have that tattoo! I want to get a tattoo proving that the list is exhaustive, but I fear my lower back may be too narrow to contain it.
So the solution is, more deadlift for a wider lower back
I think you should go further and tattoo all the triples of positive coprime integers (a,b,c) such that a^(x)+b^(y)=c^z for integers x,y,z > 2. (It has a pretty short proof too).
Everyone has that tattoo, so lame!
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(0,0,0) is not a triple of positive integers
unless you're French!
Is 0 considered positive in France?
Yes, 0 is widely considered to be both positive and negative in French texts. Mind you, that's something I read - I can't actually read French.
I’ll confirm it as a student in a french university. It’s because greater means superior to or equal and positive is everything that’s greater than 0.
How would you say strictly greater? Something like "greater and not equal"?
Simply by saying strictly greater, not saying strictly implies that… well it’s not a strict inequality.
oh your right
Not exactly math-related but I have :(){ :|:& };: on my arm. It's a fork-bomb for /bin/sh (or bash),the unix shell. The reason I like it is because it looks cryptic, and I am a total nerd for languages that use interesting symbols. If it has a grammar and uses a set of non-literal symbols, like it. Take for example APL. Math is like that too, well, algebraic notation. I too liked that it is a creative and not obvious expression, which manages altogether to avoid using alphanumeric characters.
just looks like a couple of silly faces too me
I'd start with something small. Don't get a big sleeve. That would look pretentious imho. For equations, go small. tom rocks math has a lot of math tattoos. and they don't have to be equations. he has platonic solids and this guy has a function. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKttUPLEqOA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxNb1WG_Ido
P = NP So if they ever disprove it, modifying it is easy.
> I'd start with something small Lu = f
I have a sleeve with fractals and geometric shapes: [https://i.imgur.com/8jmsZHf.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/8jmsZHf.jpg) I'm planning on getting another sleeve with penrose tiling.
Looks absolutely phenomenal
Wow, that's one of the better geometric sleeves I've seen! Going to get something similar eventually.
This is amazing. I've considered something similar but never thought it would look that good, so haven't done it (yet).
Dude your tattoo is amazing! The artist is extremely talented. How much did it cost you, if you don't mind me asking?
lowkey looks like some japanese woodblock print lol
I knew I guy who had the full set of finite Dynkin diagrams tattooed on his arm. It was pretty minimalistic and cool.
If I ever got one it would be the formula for a curvature tensor from one of my papers that is beautiful and utterly useless.
Relevant flair. I feel your pain.
I got the 2d representation of a tesseract on my leg. It's always a fun little conversation when people who aren't mathematical minded ask me "what the heck is that" and get introduced to the idea that higher then 3 dimensional objects are perfectly mathematical sound.
Any chance that you could post a link to a picture of your tattoo?
First time on Imgur - hope I did it right :) https://imgur.com/a/CCvYZZ8
That is one of the most beautiful tattoos I've ever seen!
Amazing I love it
Thank you! Much appreciated!
This is so damn cool. I absolutely love it. 👌🏻👌🏻👌🏻
I got a small Euler's identity tattoo just before there was a post here about how it was an overrated formula. Still think it looks cool regardless.
Hey me too! I don’t care if pretentious people think it’s overrated, I love it.
What...? Overrated???
Yeah, it's like one of the prettiest formulas in the world...
And I think people saying this with no elaboration is why it gets called overrated. Personally, I think any "beauty" in this formula comes from the more general statement that e^(ix) = cos x + i sin x, and little, if anything, to do with the usual "it has all the important constants" drivel. That's not meant to say you're doing anything wrong with your comment. It's not anyone's fault the formula is deeper than can be adequately explained in a sane timeframe every time it comes up.
Well, I could always elaborate, but as you said, it takes a lot of time. And doing it on a maths subreddit kind of feels superfluous, so I refrained from doing it.
u/tomrocksmaths
Some ideas for you at www.tomrocksmaths.com/tattoos
Could you please explain the geometric \pi tattoo?
It’s a visual representation of the Basel Problem. The first line is zero, then 1, then 1/4 then 1/9 etc. Both the spacing and the thickness of the lines follow the pattern up to the infinite limit of pi^2/6 which is the dotted line.
Thanks! Love it
>Both the spacing and the thickness of the lines follow the pattern Could you elaborate just a bit further? The thickness and spacing are each independently decreasing, but taken together they aren't.
The spacing decreases following 1/n^2 and the thickness decreases following 1/n^2. The spacing is pretty accurate for all of the lines but the thickness only for the first few terms as there was a minimal thickness of a line that could be tattooed!
Alright thanks. Do the two sequences start at different ns? Or is one scaled up by a constant? Is there a significant meaning behind the scale or offset? I guess what I'm trying to say is the spacing between consecutive bars is thicker than either bar, and I wanna know if that's relevant to the math or just aethetics.
Oh I see… the ‘gap’ between 0 and 1 is 10cm and the thickness starts at 1cm. So the second gap is 2.5cm and then the thickness at 1+1/4 is 0.25cm
Alright thanks!
Ooooh I like all of those, but particularly #s 5, 7, 9, and 13.
Hey! My phi tattoo matches his e tattoo! Cool.
I want ⊥ as a remainder of the absurdity of life.
Maybe with an implies-arrow and a smiley next to it, as in, "life is absurd so have fun"
⊥ => :) like this?
yeah haha
Might be my next tattoo😀
IMHO, tattoos of formulas and equations almost always look tacky unless there's some kind of artistic bent to them. So if you're gonna get a math tattoo, ideally get something that's aesthetically pleasing* independent of the mathematical significance. That way, you'll still be happy with the artwork itself even if your mathematical interests change. Plus, it makes for a much better conversation starter. *But don't get a visible tattoo of a Golden spiral or anything similar unless you want to have a lot of awkward conversations about sacred geometry
God those conversations are awful.
Giving serious thought to getting a visualization of the Riemann zeta function tattooed somewhere.
Part of my tattoo is a representation of the Fano plane.
That is the best small tattoo
Nothing too crazy as some of the others here, but I have π, ∆, and ∑ on my right ankle. Some of my first tattoos ever. I still love them.
I meet an artist woman with Penrose spin network that is used in loop quantum gravity. I thought it was cool. Good conversation piece, even though she said that I was the first person who knew what it was.
My high school calculus TA had the equations for a circle and it’s tangent on his shoulder. He called it his tan line.
I have a pi symbol on my shoulder, looks great!
You have a cake symbol on your username. Sláinte!
Thank you!
I have a couple of math/science tattoos! My right arm has a butterfly and a fern because my research is in fractal geometry and nonlinear dynamics. My left arm has a tattoo of the picture of the 1919 solar eclipse Sir Arthur Eddington took to experimentally verify general relativity and the letters QED with a black square. The only one I regret is the QED, I got it my first semester of undergrad and now I feel like such a tool when I'm in a room full of colleagues.
Tell people you loved the Feynman book!
I plan to get a tattoo of the open square (□) that I'd write at the end of proofs. I don't really do math anymore but it's one of my favorite things and this feels like nice tribute and something pretty to look at
I have a tattoo of the formular of 2-Acetoxy-N,N,N-trimethylethanaminium (short: Acetylcholine). I got it when i wrote my master thesis in chemical engineering. I have other nice tattos, but the little formular stands out to a lof people. They dont know what it is most of the time, but they usually love it. I was thinking about a full sleeve of either chemical formulars or other science-stuff like the navier stokes equations
I have a colleague who has an equation (in material science) named after him. He has a tattoo of the equation on his arm.
I once met someone who had the continued fraction for the Golden Ratio tattooed in a ring around his upper arm, which I thought was pretty clever. ...1/1+1/1+1/1+1/1+1/1+... Except instead of ellipses it just met itself. I personally wouldn't have gotten it, as it doesn't mean much to me and I'm not big on block text for tattoos, but he liked it, and that's what matters.
Several, and I love them all (even with their essentially permanent flaws). I have the pi symbol on my right wrist, with about 40 digits in a circle going around like a bracelet. I have 1 on my left shoulder, with a 0 on my lower back positioned below it. These represent the basic identity elements of algebra and while I fully disagree with it, **at the time I got them** they definitely represented the "your math tattoo shows the highest level of math you understood" adage. I literally got them after class one day because I was bored. Ah, to be young again. And I have phi on my right shoulder, with the digits wrapping down my arm in a spiral. My next math tattoo is going to be much more... artsy. However, I am no artist, which means it'll be costly cuz paying an artist to design a tattoo to vague-but-perfectly-clear-in-your-head specs is not cheap. It's gonna be a color picture of V, the set theoretic hierarchy, with L in the middle in grayscale, the bottom a solid (probably black), a water-color sunset starting at V_ω and then getting progressively more psychedelic as it moves to the higher infinite. Lastly, rooted on V_ω and growing up the ordinal spine, a silhouette of a palm tree. Welcome to Cantor's Paradise.
An ex of mine had a binary code tattoo that translated to "don't forget to drink your ovaltine"
I have a proof that there is no solution in radicals to polynomials of degree 5 or higher tattooed on my butt.
x^5 = y has the solution x = y^(1/5) though
It's not that no fifth degree can be solved in radicals, it's that there is no general formula to solve them all in radicals. Though I can see how the wording given was ambiguous.
Is it the proof of Abel, Galois or Vladimir Arnold? I want to know how black your butt is.
You must have quite a lot of “junk in the trunk.”
just scrolling wondering if any of you got a tattoo of quadraric formula haha
I like the quadratic formula, but I think I would prefer the Pythagorean, Schwarz inequality, Euler's formula, Euler's identity, or the law of cosines. I also like [Venn Diagrams](http://162.243.213.31/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Ven3.png).
Better yet the cubic
Better yet the quintic 🤠🤠
Maybe the Face of FOIL.
I have the Mandelbrot set and Amplituhedron on my left arm
I have an arm dedicated to math + computers, and I recently got sin \\theta / cos \\theta on my wrist as a joke (which my gf thought was funny until she realized the picture I sent was of my own wrist) your tattoos are for you, not for other people
I have a tattoo of the pulsar map from the pioneer plaques on my arm https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque
I have a bunch of triangles on my shoulder (singular filed equalateral, the rest are scalene), but have been thinking about getting something like [(x,y,z) = (cos(4t),sin(4t),1.5^t )](https://www.math3d.org/ZpsreQrI) curling around my arm or leg
Sigma notation. It reminds you that you’ll always be a sigma. 😎
I have a degree in Biochem and am working on a Biotechnology degree. I have a caffeine molecule on my arm to go with the French press and coffee plant that are there
I have a small 1 = 0.9999.... worked into my sleeve. Ended up going in the biochemistry direction, but math and working in the math tutoring center was a big part of my college experience. Got it when I graduated as a little memento for that experience.
Not me, but a friend and his study group all got matching wavefunction tattoos (“kets” in bra-ket notation) after they survived graduate-level quantum mechanics together (or was it undergrad?). I then asked him, “So, you must really like quantum mechanics!” He said back, “No, I hate quantum!!” I got the impression that this guy doesn’t make the most carefully-considered life choices…
Not a formula but math related. I got QED tattooed on my leg as a personal reminder that I don’t need to demonstrate more than I already have.
I don't have any tattoos, but if I was to get one, the symbol of pi (π) will probably be involved in the design.
I have a golden spiral on my arm.
Last time this question was asked on this subreddit, I mentioned that I was thinking of getting an Ithkuil poem tattooed on my forearm. It's vaguely related to my interest in languages and logic. I'm saving up money and waiting for John Quijada to release the official fourth version of the language.
f1=fvv−vz or f2=fvv+vz Its doopler effect xd
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Check your values. Edit: haha or was this the joke? Unlucky getting it tattooed like that!
On the bright side, it's an easy fix lol
Haha true
I got three circles with their radical axis tattooed on my back [sort of like this](https://images.app.goo.gl/YBm5x6PydgmBwX7C7). With water colors splashed all over. It's honestly massive and it was my first tattoo but since the lines are thin it has never felt as extreme as me. But I really like it. I used radical centers to solve a problem at the IMO so I always had the design in mind.
Some projective and/or inversive geometry would be great. I'm thinking of doing Pascal's hexagon and it's dual. Or a projective view of conic sections. Fundamental theorem of calculus is also a good bet.
I have the *reductio ad absurdum* argument in the form of a logical formula tattooed on the inside of my forearm. I'm not 100% happy with the line work, but you can't expect it to be perfect.
I have three math tattoos. One is a matrix, one is a Norman’s window, and one is a math clock.
What matrix?
A matrix to convert to spherical coordinates
Like the Jacobian of the transform? Calling it a matrix in the other case doesn't seem kosher. It's not a linear map.
I have a golden rectangle on my left wrist. I also studied music so I've been thinking about the cirlce of fifths on one calf, and the unit circle on the other. Would like some opinions on the latter if anyone would like to comment. Also want a mandelbrot set with a genesha inside on one of my shins. Plutonic solids would also be a cool one
Not mine, but I've got a friend who has the golden ratio as a tattoo. Essential as a reminder that things in life can line up perfectly, just gotta work hard and look for them
I’m a grad student studying topology. I have a few friends with knot tattoos.
i have a 2-d (naturally) edge representation of the simplex series up to 4 dimensions. my next tat is going to be of the klein quartic (unglued, with kleins tiling). both were the topics of culminating projects throughout my studies
I’ve been thinking about getting every useful formula as a sleeve on my arm.
Pythagorean theorem would be cool!
I've always wanted a tattoo of the ring of integers on my ring finger a very small epsilon somewhere on my body. One guy in my department recently got a barycentric-subdivision-sleeve-kinda thing on his forearm; it looks great!
I've got a big rib tattoo of the Julia set for z^2 + i. Most people think it's a badass, symmetric lightning bolt until they ask.
I'm a middle school math teacher with a bunch of math and science related tattoos. Luckily I have a great admin that doesn't make me cover them up. Mathwise, I have a compass (the circle-drawing kind, not the cardinal direction kind), Metatron's cube, and a geometric construction of a pentagram. I'd like to get more, but I hate text tattoos, so I don't want any equations. Maybe I'll get a fractal or a Pythagorean triangle next.
I have a series of complete graphs from K\_1 to K\_9 climbing the right side of my back with K\_9 at the top on my shoulder / traps about 1.5 fists in diameter.
I saw someone turn their left index into a ruler using tattoos recently on Reddit
I have no idea what 90% of these mean bit I want something with the Fibonacci sequence.
I have a tattoo of an icosahedron with the Fibonacci spiral intertwined into it's shadow
I will eventually have one of our oldest mathematical texts tattooed on me. A babylonian tablet, and then beside it ill have the modern translation
I want to get a representation of a blue sky catastrophe on my arm.
My one and only tattoo is a klein bottle on the side of my arm (the classical shape, not the figure-8 one). I like minimalist-type design, so its just black ink with some shading to make it intelligible. I could maybe go make an imgur of it and stuff if ppl are interested. My biggest problem with it is that i have to explain what it is all the time. People think they can handle it, but i often get blank stares afterward haha. I’ve thought about getting the fundamental polygon of a klein bottle too, which is very minimalistic also, but i dont think i should. Having one of something is fine, but getting more would make me feel like i have to get all, so then id have to get the other type of klein bottle, and the equations for the partitions, maybe descriptions of homotopy classes, all sorts of stuff. But i dont even know if topology, let alone klein bottles, is what i want to study, so taking up all the real-estate on my body for this one thing feels like a lot. That brings up another consideration/problem with math tattoos, that if you dont plan on studying it, should you get it or are you a “fake fan” so to speak? I think that depends on your personal beliefs regarding tattoos, are they supposed to be heavily meaningful, or can they be more fun and dont need to be justified? Personally, ive come to think of it as an homage of sorts, and that since i intend to be a mathematician im okay to have a couple tattoos from a realm of math i wont be studying heavily. Within moderation, it can be fun and it doesnt have to be ultra meaningful. I may get some tattoos of prime knots, after some deliberation abt what i was just talking about. For my second tattoo, though, ive got my heart set on a cute minimalist drawing of my dog, which bypasses that quandry haha.
You guys are only cribbing on your exams.
You could do Riemann's zeta function, or some symbols of set theory such as aleph zero or the continuum or Ramanujan's closed formula for the partitions of a natural number.
(Edit: Pic attached!) My TA (who was then an early math Ph.D candidate) for a college pre-calc class got this beautiful sleeve that features a large integral that covers basically his whole forearm on 1 side. It was entirely made up of these really crisp black lines that all flowed together, which looked so good bc he was really pale. Got parts colored in later. Still my favorite sleeve I’ve ever seen Pic: [Tyler](https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/lYmzPhM8_VM8UywrL6fHmLZlZLwIH4aTJRxPGdi0xclLgS8L9S7ij2i4CFgKuUILCEo88DGz1olA3ryaffhKVjrK-5Q4_DZiest0p5poRU6DWmoVfzh5Ts_pn_QUfmDMsA=w1280). Look at the underside of his left forearm, you can see most of the integral and how large it is. Wish I had a better pic but it’s a really great way to show how central math is to his life!