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This afternoon I went over to the UC Berkeley campus for a talk by Marcus du Sautoy, author of the absolutely fascinating book, The Music of the Primes. Du Sautoy is Professor of Mathematics at Oxford. The event was organized by the Math Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley.
Mathematics fascinates me. And while my B.S. is in Applied Math (1964), I never became a mathematician. I probably would not have been a very good one. (Most math majors are good bridge players, and I never liked playing cards, so my fate was sealed early on.) But I can see maybe having become a math teacher.
Fortunately (or not) I discovered computers early on, and altho computers and math are related, they're not really the same. Still, I've tried to keep up my math chops, and I still enjoy reading calculus books. (My fave is Ralph Agnew's textbook from 1962, and, of course, Richard Courant's classic.) This is great literature. I'm always looking for ways to explain things. And, after all, I am a technical writer.
There's been an explosion in popular books on topics in math recently, and Marcus du Sautoy's book is a prime example. (sorry). There are a couple of books about the number (and concept of) zero, many about pi, and even e (Euler's constant), and imaginary numbers.
Surprisingly, the S.F. Chronicle carried an article about today's lecture, so maybe that's why the Chan Shun auditorium, one of the biggest on campus, was completely full. Many students, but also many older folks from the community, like me, and even some pre-teens with their parents.
It helps to know that du Sautoy is quite a performer. His appearances on BBC TV and radio are legend, like his talk on "Why Beckham Chose the 23 Shirt". And today's talk met all expectations, and then some.
For example, in explaining how Reimann's Zeta function improved on Gauss's approximation for finding the number of primes below a certain number, du Sautoy had to explain how the buildup of the harmonics of a sine wave can create more complex waves. To illustrate this he played a violin, then a clarinet, and finally riffed on his trumpet with a canned jazz combo streaming off his laptop! It did stretch the point a bit, but it was entertaining.
You can find much of his talk on the internet here, and here.. And of course his book covers much much more. He actually gets into why the persuit of prime numbers is of such great interest to mathematicians for centuries. He interviews some of the major players and exposes some academic rivalries. (Those rivalries still go on, apparently; see this negative review of du Sautoy's book on the MMA website.)
It was exciting to think about math for an hour or so today. I'll probably pick up a few more books on the subject just to keep the juices flowing.
And it was a beautiful day to be back on campus again. It's getting close to finals week, and there was lots of activity. Almost made me want to register for next semester.
Same with me, Richard. Math has always fascinated me, but I knew I would never be as good as many others at it. Calculus was fun in high school, but in college it was all, well, theorems. I even took an honors course in Analysis in Rn during my junior year at Chicago merely as a way of proving something to myself, and barely got a C (the professor, incidentally, was Robert Fefferman, a relative of the composer Lanie Fefferman). So I'm with you---math is a beautiful subject, much like physics, but it wasn't for me, so I appreciate it from afar.
