For the love of mathematics

Vincent Van Gogh embedded a little bit of math in the starry night

Mathematics has always been an integral part of my life. Now, I would love to tell you that it was because of my innate ability to absorb numbers and play with arithmetic. But the sad truth is, it has been integral because I was not at all good at it. Oh, and by the way, I am a Chartered Accountant (whispers - First attempt).

It was only a couple of years ago, that I started to fall in love with Math. And I fell hard - for I discovered such fascinating stories, ridiculously intelligent people, and mind boggling ideas. The idea of this section of the blog is to share this newfound love of mathematics with you, the reader, and also hopefully show that math isn't all that bad.

Anyway, I realised I was bad at math because of the way it is taught. I recently came across a wonderful video which explains the reason why most of us hate math. Now before I go on, I would like to introduce you to a wonderful YouTube channel - Numberphile. Much of what you will read here, my love affair with mathematics - is all because of this nifty little YT channel that published its first video about 10 years ago in 2012. Brady (The creator of Numberphile) - thank you!

After that meandering segue, let's get back to the original thought - the link between a generation of students collectively loathing mathematics and the way it is taught. In the video a Jaime Lannister looking fella - Professor Edward Frenkel so eloquently posits a hypothesis - Let's assume you are an art's student and all you were shown as reference material were the work of the greatest of the greats - Da vinci, Van Gogh, Goya, what have you - you are bound to be mesmerised by the beauty of the subject. This is because these painters were able to express emotions that you would not be able to put into words. Now imagine, if instead of these great painters, you were just shown extremely ordinary, uninspiring paintings that you had to benchmark your learnings against; and slowly you start seeing the point Mr. Frenkel is trying to make here.

Mathematics, as a discipline, is so rich in terms of its stories, discoveries, the personalities, the real world application of some of the theorems but it is somehow just restricted to mugging up formulae instead of understanding the ideas behind it. Just imagine a classroom where children are told stories about how the man who showed the world that - in a right angled triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides (a.k.a. the Pythagoras Theorem); That this man was revered by people in ancient Greece, and that there was a religion called Pythagoreanism. I don't know about you, but if I was told that a2+b2=c2 was written by a once living God - I would have approached Geometry quite differently.

Over the next year, I shall be looking at 11 such stories, ideas, personalities, that interest me, in the realm of mathematics and will take a deep dive in those stories and whip up a blogpost at the end of it. If this is the kind of thing that interests you, then do consider signing up, it will save you the hassle of logging on to the website; instead you can read these stories right from your inbox- I shall be writing a mathematics related post on the first Monday of every month.

Now, to give this endeavour some direction and to save myself the trouble of going completely insane - I have decided to jot down some of the topics that I shall be looking at for this section of the blog. I am going to write 11 posts and I have about 7 topics that I am already extremely fascinated by and I want to learn more about them in a scientific way.

The topics, in no particular order, are:

- The Collatz Conjecture - that great unsolved mystery

- The incredible story of the number 1729

- Fermat's Last Theorem

- Simpson's and their mathematical secrets

- Some infinities are bigger than other infinities

- Zeno's Paradoxes and why they will melt your mind

- Surely you're cheating, Mr. Feynman

For the remaining 4 topics, I want to keep an open mind and hope that while researching the above topics - in some corner of a dingy rabbit hole - I will find my blogpost.

I hope this post made an addition to the amount of happiness you were previously experiencing, it subtracted the sorrows, it multiplied your excitement, and it divided... well something (I got tired of making these terrible puns, for which I apologise - I had to get them out of my system).

Let me end this post by a quote from Terence Tao - arguably the greatest mathematician alive - which succinctly explains the whole point of this blog:

"For me, I guess the main motivation is the satisfaction of finally understanding some tricky mathematical concept or phenomenon and then explaining it to others." - Terence Tao