Do I Count by Gunter M. Ziegler

Author:Gunter M. Ziegler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ISBN 10: 1466564911 ISBN 13: 9781466564916 ASIN: B00DV64PSS British National Bibliography System Number: 016385567 OCLC Number: 908078174 eISBN 10: 146656492X eISBN 13: 9781466564923 (PDF) Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 2013009573 Publisher: A. K. Peters/CRC Press (2013)
Published: 2015-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Where Mathematics Is Created

If one asks a mathematician about when and where some decisive idea came to life, one will rarely get a satisfactory answer. Mathematical ideas do not arise in a laboratory or other specific workplace, and only rarely do they come according to a plan or a well-laid session of intense thought. Instead, they arise at random points as little steps or larger jumps along a path that courses through the mathematician’s life.

To make mathematics, one does not need much. Paper and pencil are the standard tools (I prefer graph paper, a soft pencil, and an eraser), the thinking is done with the head, and the checking of computations takes place on the laptop. The equipment in a mathematics laboratory is modest and also portable. Serge Lang tells a nice story about an engineering department that received a letter from the dean: “Why do you need so much money for equipment? Why can you not be more like mathematicians, who need only pencils, paper, and erasers; or like the philosophers, who need only pencil and paper?” Someone who wants to develop ideas as a mathematician needs to find time to think, needs to follow trains of thought, needs to have peace and quiet or diversions, and needs to concentrate intensely or relax and think freely. To develop ideas as a mathematician, one needs to be able to take the mind on a trip. There is no general recipe for success. Mathematics is highly variegated, and mathematicians are multifarious, even if they are often just stereotyped as gray-haired eccentrics with thick glasses. The places in which mathematics is done reflect the great variety of mathematical thinking styles. Let us therefore make an excursion into this diversity and approach, anecdotally, answers to the questions of where and how mathematicians work, and where and how mathematics arises.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.