Professor Marcus
du Sautoy took us again into a wonderful, interesting, and clever world of
mathematics. This time, we were off to Europe, the powerhouse of mathematics
after the fall of Middle East. But before we started travelling round, he
showed us Piero della Francesca's The Flagellation of Christ, where he analyzed the possibility of expressing
a 3-dimensional effect on a 2-dimensional plane. It was so nice to see how he
did that!
Allons-y!
The journey to France is not for visiting the infamous Eiffel Tower, but to
visit a cool village. What’s so cool about this village? It’s named after one
of the greatest and renowned mathematician of all time, Rene Descartes! His house,
wherein he slept and realized that algebra and geometry have a special
relationship after all: equations of curved lines, is now a museum of his
works.
Pierre
Fermat’s work on prime numbers are so clever, it is now used on ATM cards as
passwords which was called “The Last Theorem”.
Tut!
Tut! And we are on Britain! Home of The Big Ben and The London Eye! But, as
said earlier, we went there not for sightseeing but understanding mathematics. Here
onwards we went to Isaac Newton’s hometown, Woolsthorpe, England. Many of the
locals there know him especially his laws of gravity. But it was not only
gravity that he did discover, but advancement in the field of calculus that is
still used today by modern engineers. However, Newton was involved into a
controversy with fellow mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in which
calculus is his original idea and not Newton’s. I bet scientists never used
references and literature citations during the 17th century. These
kinds of arguments from scientists became a part of their jobs!
I
also bet that Professor du Sautoy is a fanboy of the Bernoulli mathematics. He
was so fascinated in seeing the works of their family of mathematicians. And so
were us! When he met one of Bernoulli’s descendants, he was so amazed by him! When
he recalled his night talking to him, he felt so nice about it, and for me it
was also an amazing experience to meet a descendant of great mathematicians
that set forth the pace of mathematics in a new level.
We
also saw the works of Leonhard Euler, the discoverer of “bendy” geometry, and
pioneered the use of functions in algebra. We also have Carl Friedrich Gauss who
discovered modular arithmetic. This work of Gauss inspired Georg Friedrich
Bernhard Riemann which was the Riemannian geometry which was used for treating
electricity and magnetism in the framework of general relativity.
It
was again a fascinating experience to be on a mathematical journey in the
European continent. And I have the very highest hopes that someday we would be
somewhat like the mentioned mathematicians, maybe not on the things they
discovered but on how they come up with some logical questions and its answers
that will help the next generations.
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