Weblog Entry - 12/26/2002: "Math=Truth=Beauty"

[Previous entry: "More interesting news from the (Eco)Logical Blog"]
Green Consciousness Archive Index
[Next entry: "Scientific American Journal"]

Click Here to Sign the Safe Space Petition

12/26/2002 "Math=Truth=Beauty"

You've always suspected that, deep down, mathematics rules the world.

As you read this, ex-physicists are probably devising ever more sophisticated ways to wager your pension fund on Wall Street, and no doubt five geniuses in a government agency that does not officially exist are developing data-mining algorithms that will calculate the likelihood your baby sister is a terrorist.
But there was little to no popular media coverage of the Aug. 20 announcement of the Fields Medals, the highest honor in mathematics. Given every four years to the best mathematicians under the age of 40, this year's prizes were awarded at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing. No doubt you didn't even know they were getting together.
The medals went to Laurent Lafforgue of the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques, in Bures-sur-Yvette, France, and to Vladimir Voevodsky of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. The 2002 Nevanlinna Prize, one of the highest honors in computer science, went to Madhu Sudan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Speaking by e-mail, Lafforgue said: "When non-mathematicians ask me what I work on, I don't try to explain it to them because I believe that this is nearly impossible. The same with mathematicians who work in other fields." Voevodsky is traveling and could not be reached. But Sudan has been successful, he said, in explaining his work to his 3-year old daughter. If she can get it, so can we.
Let us recognize that mathematicians are not like you or me. We the many can detect some beauty in the paintings of Titian, feel a certain sad hope in a Chopin sonata, recognize the grace in Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. But, most likely, the isomorphism between a modified motivic cohomology of an algebraic variety and the modified singular cohomology of its natural topological space does little for us.
Which is, really, a shame. For there is a beauty in mathematics, which you may have glimpsed that day in first grade when it struck you how peculiar zero was: that you could add it to any other number -- any number at all! -- and the number would stay the same. Or maybe you've encountered a slick little thing called the square root of -1. There are men who have this number engraved on their tombstones.....more, click above.

It seems that math is the unifying theme beneath the surface of everthing in the universe, and even in chaos there is pattern and order. Patterns seem to be of two types,those of information which is ordered by intelligence, and randem patterns gererated by the circumstances of the moment,and the physical properties (which are mathimatical) of the componants involved. The probabilities involved in either case are often greater than the age of the universe or the estimated number of the molecules therein that these could be either not the result of intelligence in the former or that they could be repeated exactly the same as in the latter. Do humans invent new information or do they just discover,sort,and organize it while drawing inferences from such? Where does intelligence begin and end?

Posted by charles jones @ 01/17/2004 12:55 PM CST

Posted by charles jones @ 01/17/2004 12:56 PM CST