Love and Math - The Heart of Hidden Reality

Edward Frenkel

Basic Books

2013

306 páginas

10h 12m

ISBN-10: 0465050743

What if you had to take an art class in which you were only taught how to paint a fence? What if you were never shown the paintings of van Gogh and Picasso, weren’t even told they existed? Alas, this is how math is taught, and so for most of us it becomes the intellectual equivalent of watching paint dry.

In Love and Math, renowned mathematician Edward Frenkel reveals a side of math we’ve never seen, suffused with all the beauty and elegance of a work of art. In this heartfelt and passionate book, Frenkel shows that mathematics, far from occupying a specialist niche, goes to the heart of all matter, uniting us across cultures, time, and space.

Love and Math tells two intertwined stories: of the wonders of mathematics and of one young man’s journey learning and living it. Having braved a discriminatory educational system to become one of the twenty-first century’s leading mathematicians, Frenkel now works on one of the biggest ideas to come out of math in the last 50 years: the Langlands Program. Considered by many to be a Grand Unified Theory of mathematics, the Langlands Program enables researchers to translate findings from one field to another so that they can solve problems, such as Fermat’s last theorem, that had seemed intractable before.

At its core, Love and Math is a story about accessing a new way of thinking, which can enrich our lives and empower us to better understand the world and our place in it. It is an invitation to discover the magic hidden universe of mathematics.

Resenhas (1)

4 (Muito bom)

The world of math and the life of mathematicians is well explored in this book.

"One of the principal functions of mathematics is the ordering of information, or, as Langlands himself put it, creating order from seeming chaos."

"Though scientists have been exploiting this "effectiveness" for centuries, its roots are still poorly understood. Mathematical truths seem to exist objectively and independently of both the physical world and the human brain. There is no doubt that the links between the world of mathematical ideas, physical reality, and consciousness are profound and need to be further explored."

"Thus, the Langlands Program exemplifies the four qualities of mathematical theories that we discussed: universality, objectivity, endurance and relevance to the physical world."

The story of Edward is both amazing and inspiring. A tale of someone who at a young age found his element. And yet it was not a subject that attracted him in school. Physics did that. But a succession of mentors, at the right time each, beginning with Eugene showed him a world he not stay away from. Math wasn't done, there was lot to discover.
Theories take inspiration, improvisation, and a formula is close to a artistic realization, just as anything else. Mathematicians choose their field based too on the chance of reaching results in their lifetime. It takes lots of work before and after "insights", and throughout the book the amount of dedicated work of many mathematicians is clear.
The soviet union played an important role in math, and by being one of the last free realms for intelectual exploration, it flourished there.

The langlands program, that tries to bring together distant fields from the math world is explained, and the level of math in the book is sometimes too deep.