DEMOSTHENES B. PANAGIOTAKOS

Associate Professor and Head of the Department
of Nutrition and Dietetics
Harokopio University in Athens, Greece
Member of AgroFOOD industry hi-tech Scientific
Advisory Board

This is my story of how I started studying statistics and epidemiology of human health ... when I was a child I liked very much listening to stories, as many kids in my age (I believe!) ... one of my favourite stories that produced numerous questions was about God ... where is God living, how does He look like, can He speak Greek, can He see us,...? Many years after, during high-school, I came to face with a mysterious equation, i.e., eπ × ι + 1 = 0. This formula suggested by a great Mathematician, Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), includes the five most important symbols of mathematics! These are the numbers 1 and 0, the constant π (pi, which is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, and is approximately equal to 3.14159…), the constant e that is the base of the natural logarithm and it is approximately equal to 2.71828..., and the imaginary unit number i which is the square root of minus one. For many years, this equation was regarded as mystic formula containing representatives from each branch of the mathematical “tree”. In particular, the arithmetic branch is represented by 0 and 1, the algebra is represented by the imaginary un ...