From here to there, to there to there, to here!

4th Installment- Story of Maths "to Infinity and Beyond"

True mathematicians have always sought for adventure more than anything else. It might not be in fields, the wilderness or basically outdoors but these extraordinary adventures occur in the mind but does not limit there. Like astronauts kept on seeking for excitement in space, they discover the math behind it. Indeed math is the universal language.

Sad to say but this is the last exposure of Marcus du Sautoy talking in our mathematics 1 class. But this doesn’t make the fun in math any lesser. Today is the twenty-first century and a century before left amazing problems that’s still unsolved. Georg Cantor a brilliant mind dared to study and understand what lies beneath an amazing mathematical phenomenon; infinity. He began to measure infinity which is impossible. Measure in a way that it is not literally bounded but he found out that there were kinds of infinity not only one and that there are smaller or larger than the others.

Who would have thought that the seven bridges of Königsberg are responsible for the graph theory thanks to Euler! Who is now my second favorite mathematician since he was curious enough and that he created a pathway to the breakthrough of topology. Most of math discoveries and theories are accidental. Like Henri Poincaré who was just trying to solve a mathematical problem by chance stumbled on chaos theory. This breakthrough was the beginning of a new revolution in technology which they call “smart”. It started new sets of machines that we people now benefit from; like ones that control regularity of heartbeats. This modern math was phenomenal until it became a chaos in the mid-20^th century. Even if math is diverse and beneficial its complexity also leads to inconsistency. That is why continuous validations are done in the theories that are already proven. We need to face the truth that our limited minds cannot overlook on the unknowable.

Today new discoveries are made, still there’s these unsolved problems waiting to be understood. The prime numbers’ complexity is continuously studied. There’s even grand cash waiting to the one that can prove Riemann’s theorem and of course patent and appearance in books. Mathematics may be formed either by an accident, coincidence or maybe just plain intelligence. Top of it all curiosity make our minds work infinitely ∞