The Only Woman in the Room by Eileen Pollack

Author:Eileen Pollack [Pollack, Eileen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-4661-6
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2015-07-23T04:00:00+00:00

Still, I took seriously Hersey’s suggestion that I combine my two passions and write about science. A pair of mathematicians had been invited to discuss their solution to something called the four-colour map problem. For centuries, cartographers had suspected no more than four colors were required to differentiate the regions on a map, but no one had been able to prove this conjecture. Two professors from Illinois had programmed a computer to test every possible counterexample of the rule; when the computer failed to find a single map that required more than four colors, they pronounced the theorem proved. Most mathematicians cried foul. Proofs were supposed to be “beautiful” or “elegant,” a series of logical statements that followed one from the next, step by deductive step. Listening to such objections, I wondered why it wasn’t beautiful that human beings had invented a machine as elegant as the digital computer and derived the software to prove a theorem that couldn’t be proved any other way.

Thrilled by the first original idea I’d ever had, I spent weeks researching the history of the mathematical proof and then wrote a twenty-page article for the Scientific arguing that computer-based proofs met a new definition of beauty. My editor was impressed but said she needed to give my essay to a professor in the Philosophy Department to see if my arguments made sense. When she handed back my essay, I was sickened to see a dozen red-inked queries in the margins. For all I know, the questions were designed to help me strengthen my arguments. But I couldn’t make out the professor’s writing and assumed if he thought my paper had merit, he would have added a note that said so.

I have no way of evaluating that paper now: I was so ashamed I tossed my only copy in the trash. For decades, I could barely look at a map without wincing in humiliation. Then, a few years ago, I was asked to participate in a forum about a novel based on the life of the Indian genius Ramanujan. A member of the audience asked a mathematician on the panel what he meant by saying a good proof needed to be “elegant.” The mathematician offered the standard definition, then cited the computer proof of the four-colour map problem as an ugly, brute-force solution. I countered with an abbreviated version of the paper I had written decades earlier.

“Why, I never thought of that!” my fellow panelist exclaimed.

A wizened old man in the audience identified himself as a former chair of the Math Department. “Your comment strikes me as profound. Perhaps, when we say that a proof is elegant, we are not as certain as we think that we know what we mean.”

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