Clearing the Cobwebs

Its renaissance! The age of rebirth.  Apparently this is also a golden age for mathematics. The Frontiers of Maths talked all about it in a very interesting way. Here we come across the different people who made a difference. Unfortunately not all of them made it to the big screens, but their works certainly did.

It’s good to get to know the people behind the advancement of our modern world. Some of them didn’t even know how much of a difference their discovery would make and didn’t publish it. Even Isaac Newton almost didn’t publish his work until he heard of a rival.  I think this installment is actually a bit of melancholic. We get to see behind the scenes of the life of both world renowned and never-heard-of mathematicians.

Because of their contribution, we have the tendency to have the impression that they’re nice, kind, lovable, brilliant people who eventually gave us internet. But I learned it’s not always like that at all. Descartes wasn’t much of a nice guy. Gauss was grumpy and conceited that he wouldn’t share his brilliance; he even took the enthusiasm of some young mathematicians who worshiped him. Newton used his power of being the president in a math society to get all the glory and put Leibniz out of the limelight.

Leibniz’s story really caught me.  This is not to antagonize Newton, but he sure made me realize that even the most brilliant will want to have a chance at immortality- even with the knowledge of how impossible that is. This urge lead him to charge Leibniz of plagiarism because he didn’t want to share the glory of having a name in a theorem. Because that is his last chance at immortality. Theorems never die, and so does the name it’s credited to. Leibniz adored Newton and this took the best of him. Imagine being betrayed by somebody you practically worshipped. I’m pretty sure being “hurt” would be an understatement.

Nonetheless, we never really met these guys and their stories are good legends. No matter how they lived, be it blissful or dreadful, their contributions to the mathematics we know today made the world a little less mysterious and little more like home--with the cobwebs cleared.