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Math = beauty + truth / (really hard)
Explaining what the winners of the world's top awards in mathematics actually do isn't as easy as adding 2+2. But we'll give it a try.
By David Appell There is no Nobel Prize for mathematicians, the story goes, because of a love affair. Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite who established the prizes to spruce up his image, refused to endow a prize in mathematics because his wife was having an affair with the Swedish mathematician Gosta Magnus Mittag-Leffler. Nobel was afraid a math prize would be awarded to the mathematician-cum-Romeo, and so the mathematics community has forever been excluded from the most recognized award in all of science. Alas, the story is not true. Nobel never married and by all accounts was quite a lonely man. But his oversight may perhaps be why mathematicians get so little press. That, and the fact that non-mathematicians have no clue what they're up to. "Most people are so frightened of the name of mathematics that they are quite ready, quite unaffectedly, to exaggerate their own mathematical stupidity," said the English number theorist G.H. Hardy. But admit it: Whether you left math after a humiliating D in high school trigonometry or crawled away, exhausted and defeated, from a year of college calculus, 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. | |
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