Ronnie in the news

Ronnie in the news

[Peter Freyd]

  [I've appended the piece he's replying to.]

                   Copyright 2005 Newspaper Publishing PLC
                            The Independent (London)

                           August 17, 2005, Wednesday

SECTION: First Edition; COMMENT; Pg. 28

LENGTH: 192 words

HEADLINE: LETTER: MATHEMATICIANS STRUGGLE FOR TRUTH

BYLINE: RONNIE BROWN

BODY:

Sir: Seeing Boyd Tonkin's article on 'Magic numbers' (15 August) I thought, as a
mathematician, I ought to step aside from my 'essentially tragic life', not
'look at my shoes', stop 'struggling with my demons' awhile, and suggest that
perhaps a wrong impression is given of mathematics as a development of just a
few strange and egocentric minds.

Instead it is a world-wide collaborative effort involving tens of thousands,
struggling to understand, to see what is true and why it is true, and in so
doing to develop a language and notation for description, verification,
deduction, and calculation. It describes structures and analogies. It makes
difficult things easy. So it is a basis for the modern technical world.

Mathematics can also take over for its study what Shakespeare claimed for the
role of the poet: 'And as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown/
The Poet's pen turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing/ A local
habitation and a name.'

All this explains its fascination, and the joy of communicating at all levels in
the subject.

  RONNIE BROWN
  EMERITUS PROFESSOR UNIVERSITY OF WALES, BANGOR

                   Copyright 2005 Newspaper Publishing PLC
                            The Independent (London)

                            August 15, 2005, Monday

SECTION: First Edition; FEATURES; Pg. 42,43

LENGTH: 1325 words

HEADLINE: MAGIC NUMBERS; MATHS ISN'T JUST FOR TEXTBOOKS " NOWADAYS IT'S THE
INSPIRATION FOR

BYLINE: BY BOYD TONKIN

HIGHLIGHT: Prime movers: (left to right) Dougray Scott and Kate Winslet in
'Enigma', based on Alan Turing's codebreaking; David Beckham in his No 23 shirt;
Russell Crowe as John Nash in 'A Beautiful Mind'

BODY:

The progress of mathematics abounds in tall tales and unlikely stories. And they
don't come much more improbable than this. Outside, the July sun of the Aegean
is hammering down on a coastal hotel in Mykonos. Inside, America's most
charismatic statistician addresses a gathering that can boast several of the
world's top mathematicians as well as a motley assortment of science writers,
novelists, historians and theatre people. And what is he doing? He's performing
a card trick.

Persi Diaconis, now of Stanford and Harvard Universities, once made his living
this way. As a teenage prodigy, he toured the US as junior sidekick to one of
the most famous magicians of the age. Then, via gamblers' after-hours talk of
odds and probability, the sorcerer's apprentice caught the maths bug and took
the first steps towards a career in another sort of spotlight. Diaconis was the
expert who unmasked the delusions behind the so-called 'Bible Codes' (which
supposedly revealed hidden meanings within the text), but today in the Aegean,
he's merely baffling his peers.

He chucks a deck of cards towards this highly qualified audience. It's caught by
Timothy Gowers, a professor at Cambridge and recipient of a Fields Medal "the
maths equivalent of a Nobel Prize. Gowers cuts the pack, takes the top card,
then passes it to a neighbouring titan, who himself passes it on. After five
cuts, Diaconis asks holders of red-suited cards to stand up. Two do. He then
proceeds to tell all five punters exactly which card they hold. Cue a burst of
awestruck applause.

How does he do it? Diaconis quips that 'magicians aren't allowed to explain
their secrets and mathematicians can't explain their secrets'. But he tries. The
root of card-recognition tricks lies in the De Bruijn Sequences, a branch of
what's called 'combinatorics' a discipline with a long history that stretches
from the counting patterns used in Indian classical music to the coded
instructions for robots used today. The mathematicians grasp the theory easily
enough, but the mind-boggling mental speed of the practice still confounds them,
and me.

This is a taste of the first Mykonos conference on Mathematics and Narrative.
Arranged by a group known as Thales and Friends, after the ancient Greek
geometer and philosopher who reputedly measured the Pyramids, this unprecedented
project to bring scientists and storytellers together was the brainchild of the
polymath Apostolos Doxiadis. Worried that the maths he loves has drifted too far
out of the cultural mainstream, Doxiadis has already done more than his share of
bridge-building. His novel Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture (Faber) helps
to convey the life-enhancing, and life-consuming, attraction of pure
mathematical research.

Rebecca Goldstein, a philosopher and novelist who writes in her fiction about
the 'essentially tragic' lives of mathematicians, called her pet subjects 'as
bad as novelists in terms of ego'. John Allen Paulos, who writes funny and
instructive books, such as Innumeracy, about the misuse of statistics in the
media, jokes: 'How do you define an extravert mathematician? Someone who looks
at your shoes when he's talking to you.'

If you want evidence of the problem that confronts them, look no further than
today's newspapers. Millions of people now enjoy Sudoku puzzles. Forget the
pseudo-Japanese baloney: sudoku grids are a version of the Latin Square created
by the great Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in the late 18th century. Yet
these legions of amateur problem-solvers tackle puzzles accompanied by the
absurd assertion that 'no maths is involved'. In parts of popular culture,
mathematics has become not so much the love that dare not speak its name as the
love that doesn't even know its name.

So, as the sun blazed and the sea sparkled off stage, we heard stories about the
extraordinary rhythms of breakthrough and breakdown that punctuate the history
of modern maths, and stories about the thinking and imagining that
mathematicians do on the cutting edge of creation. John Barrow, another
Cambridge professor, related the story of how his play Infinities reached the
stage. Marcus du Sautoy, Oxford mathematician and Channel 4 pundit, delivered
his multimedia gig about the mysteries of prime numbers and the long quest to
prove Riemann's Hypothesis. The show took in David Beckham's Real Madrid shirt
(a prime 23), some raucous audience participation and Professor du Sautoy
himself on a surprisingly sweet trumpet.

Less noisily, Tim Gowers ended his plea for concreteness and compression in
mathematical explanations with some favourite passages from Alan Hollinghurst,
Don DeLillo and Jonathan Franzen -- to highlight the skills that good novelists
have and most mathematicians lack.

Of course, some writers and producers have turned to the lives and the works of
mathematicians for inspiration. A gifted populariser such as Simon Singh can now
sell in the hundreds of thousands " as he did with Fermat's Last Theorem. Sylvia
Nasar's bestselling biography of the game-theory pioneer John Nash, and his
decades-long mental illness, led to the big-screen adaptation of A Beautiful
Mind. This familiar, Rain Man model of the pattern-seeking maths prodigy as a
recluse, an idiot savant, or downright barking mad, recurs often -- for
instance, in fictionalised portraits (such as Enigma) of the computer prophet
and Bletchley Park cryptographer Alan Turing. And it even underlies Mark
Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, with its Asperger-
afflicted teenage narrator, always ready to reel off a series of prime numbers.

Not surprisingly, real mathematicians have mixed feelings about mass-market
yarns that present their domain as the stamping-ground of eccentrics, or even
lunatics. But, for the most part, they applaud the endeavour to dramatise the
human struggle of mathematical reasoning. Only one (absent) literary figure
really fell foul of the Mykonos mob: the American writer David Foster Wallace,
who in Everything and More wrote not a novel but a purported history of the
mathematics of infinity. The computer-science guru Martin Davis counted '86
really egregious errors' in Wallace's book. 'Are we so hard up for approval from
the humanities that we have to accept this?' he thundered.

And yet the history of modern maths features such a wealth of near-incredible
narratives that certain kinds of faction or docu-drama will exert a huge appeal.
After all, this is a field that, early in the last century, plunged into a
'foundational crisis' that left its finest minds believing that they stood not
on solid rock but on shifting sand. Out of that collective breakdown grew ideas
about general computing machines that began as the purest theory but ended up as
the intellectual inspiration of almost everything we now do with technology. If
mathematics counts as the art of reality, then you might argue that its artistic
crisis gave birth to the modern world.

This is the theme of the mathematical narrative that Doxiadis and some
colleagues will tell next. Collaborating with the Berkeley-based computer
scientist Christos Papadimitriou and the Athenian artists Alecos Papadatos and
Annie di Donna, Doxiadis has been working on a ground-breaking graphic novel
about the development of 20th-century maths and its makers, from Russell and
Hilbert to Godel and Turing.

Due in 2007, Logicomix will tell an epic human, and political, story. On the one
hand, Papadatos, the project's chief graphic artist, depicts the social turmoil,
global warfare and deadly ideologies of the last century. On the other, the core
story of maths " as with every other brand of creativity " will often come down
to the journey of a single mind alone with its dreams, and its demons. 'Like a
mathematician,' Papadatos notes, 'a cartoonist works with paper, pens " and a
waste-paper basket.'

www.thalesandfriends.org

Ronnie in the news

[Peter Freyd]

                     Copyright 2005 TSL Education Limited
                     The Times Higher Education Supplement

                               September 16, 2005

SECTION: LETTER; No.1709; Pg.17

LENGTH: 448 words

HEADLINE: Allow Beautiful Minds To Thrive

BYLINE: Ronnie Brown

BODY:

The British Association for the Advancement of Science warns that the research
assessment exercise does not recognise the importance of the public
communication of science ("Scientists want time to talk", September 9).
Experience in the mathematics faculty at Bangor was that the Teaching Quality
Assessment did not recognise it either.

This is a kind of travesty. Exploration, exposition and communication have for
centuries been recognised as essential to the progress of science.

Where would we be without Euclid's marvellous compilation of the geometry of his
day? Galileo, Faraday, Poincare, Klein, Hilbert, Einstein, Hoyle and Feynman
have all made public communication, and often disagreement with authority, an
important part of their work.

Our aim for the popularisation of mathematics has been, to modify Science
Minister Lord Sainsbury's words in the same issue of The Times Higher, to show
the public, students and the Government not only the important role that
mathematics plays in society, but also how it evolves.

Mathematics progresses partly through the solution of problems, but also through
clarification and good exposition, providing a developing language for
description, verification, deduction and calculation. It makes the difficult
easy. It works over a long timescale. It shows new possibilities through gradual
conceptual advance. It formulates new problems.

So mathematics is a foundation of the modern technological society. It is a
considerable challenge to try to show advanced mathematics from an elementary
viewpoint.

Some results of our work in popularisation of mathematics at Bangor over the
past 20 years may be seen on our website www.popmath.org.uk. We have had strong
support from, among others, the patrons of the sculptor John Robinson, for
promoting his Symbolic Sculptures.

An unplanned consequence has been sculptures by Robinson at, for example,
Bangor, Cambridge, Durham and Macquarie universities.

This supports the aim of associating mathematics and science with art, and
demonstrates art as a mode of symbolising an idea.

Work in communicating to children and the general public ideas in mathematics
has helped us to analyse and express our programme, to communicate mathematical
concepts to fellow scientists and students, and so to interdisciplinary
collaboration.

For the future of the UK, the public communication of science and mathematics
should be supported financially and in career structure, and be part of the
assessment of the success of a university and of the vitality of research and
teaching teams.

Ronnie Brown Emeritus professor of mathematics University of Wales, Bangor