Google celebrates the second degree equation, the formula that has revealed the balance between science, history and daily life for three thousand years.
Today Google dedicates a doodle to one of the most famous and – let’s face it – most feared formulas in the history of mathematics: the second degree equation, so called because the unknown (x) appears in it with an exponent of 2 and which is written
However, behind these symbols that many remember from school, one of the most brilliant inventions of human thought is hidden. It’s not just a formula: it’s a way to put order in chaos, to find hidden balances, to understand when one thing ends and another begins. It’s the mother of all “solved” problems.
Second degree equation: a history more than three thousand years long
Long before computers or search engines realized its elegance, the quadratic equation was already a companion of astronomers, surveyors, and builders. The Babylonians, three thousand years ago, solved quadratic problems to calculate areas of land or lengths of diagonals, even if they did not yet have a modern symbolic language.
The real turning point came in the 9th century with Al-Khwarizmi, the Arab-Persian mathematician from whom the word derives algebra. It is he who first identifies a way to solve the quadratic equation in general. In a treatise he describes his method based on completion and balancing: that is, it explains how to “recompose” a mathematical equilibrium, and the term al-jabr it means exactly this: put back together what is broken. In some way, Google, by dedicating a doodle to him, celebrates the embryo of modern scientific thought: the idea that a problem, if brought “equal to zero”, can find a solution.
When the world bends into a parable
The quadratic equation can be solved with a formula that many remember by heart, in many cases more for… rhythm than for understanding:
That term under the square root, the delta, decides everything: whether they exist two solutions, only one, or none real. Do you remember it? There was something magical about the moment when, at school, the delta was a perfect square: the root was “round”, the solutions were clean, the numbers fit together harmoniously. It was a sign that perhaps — for once — the task was going in the right direction.
But these solutions are not just numbers that are beautiful to look at. They are the equilibrium points of a real phenomenon, the moments when something “returns to zero”.
When the equation is drawn as a parabola, the points where it touches the horizontal axis are precisely the solutions of the equation.
At those points, the parable “touches the ground”.
Just look at the shot of a basketball player, the water coming out of a fountain or the trajectory of a rocket: in all these cases, “nature” follows a parabolic law. An object thrown into the air obeys this rule, and the moment it returns to the ground is literally there solution of a quadratic equation where the unknown is t, time.
Behind every daily gesture – a throw, a drop, a ray of light – there is a small “= 0” that closes the story and marks the return to balance.
Second degree equation: the parable of life hits the ground
Perhaps the universal success of the quadratic equation is that it is also one elegant metaphor of the world. Everything that is born, grows, reaches a maximum point and then descends, follows – in some way – the logic of a parable. It is the curve of bullets and galaxies, but also of certain economic cycles, fashions and even human passions.
Every phenomenon has a point where the forces balance, and then a descent towards a new beginning. And so, when today we see the Google Doodle dedicated to the quadratic equation, we are not simply celebrating a piece of the history of mathematics, but the formula that reminds us of a simple and ancient lesson: if we are looking for a solution, we must first set everything “equal to zero”. And then who knows, maybe we will even find two solutions.
