#maths mathematics

I was asked recently to say something inspiring on maths and its usefulness in real life. Not sure it worked that well, especially since the audience were mostly 12yo children, and also because it’s not really hyping maths as much as looking at it from another angle. 

I was asked to deliver a speech today, which would explain how great and useful mathematics is as a science. I'm not a fan of public speaking, and trying to find the right words in my head I recalled a story about a famous American physicist, Josiah Gibbs, once called by Einstein "the greatest mind in American history". He sat one day on a board of trustees of his university, as the board was arguing about whether to give more hours to mathematics or to languages in the university curriculum. Being a man of few words, Gibbs sat silently, even as the argument became more and more heated. Finally, he could take it no more: he rose to his feet (at which point the audience immediately grew quite) and made a speech. He said: "Mathematics is a language"; and the matter was finally decided.

So recalling those words I thought that if there is only one thing I can tell you today it is this: mathematics is not really a science, not even a queen of sciences. It is a language, which helps the natural sciences to express themselves in every thing even remotely quantitative. Physics, Chemistry, even Biology might study different things and use different descriptions of the real world, but at the end of the day they all have to resort to the language of mathematics to formulate the rules and the relations of their models. It is also the oldest living language, and undoubtedly the most immutable. In the oldest Egyptian papyri we find the same calculations that today are on the blackboards of every school, even though the reasons behind those calculations, and the quantities the numbers express have faded in the oblivion (incidentally, one of the tasks deals with finding the right beer recipe, and ends on a cheerful note: "Behold!" it says, "The quantity of beer is found to be correct" --- I guess that means beer is almost as old as mathematics).

Let me phrase it another way. My job is developing statistical models for financial markets. We write a model of how market works, and then write machines, robots if you want, to trade using those models, hopefully earning us some money in the process. And a lot of people, especially people who know mathematics well, immediately ask me: how do you use mathematics in your models? which fields? which results? But this is a misleading question, because it is in a way similar to asking me how I use English in my everyday work. The function of mathematics is not to give answers to the problems at hand, because almost all real-world problems are too messy to have a precise solution in mathematical terms; the function of mathematics is to enable discussion about those problems. It is hard to imagine that I would be able to formulate, explain or even understand the things I do in my daily job in any detail without using the English language, but same applies to mathematics as well.

So in the end, recalling how I thought in your age, I want to give another, more practical reason, why one should study mathematics. You see, I didn't know what I want to be in my life, and wanted to keep my options open. If you emphasize Physics in your studies, well, you might become a good physicist. Study History hard --- and you will know everything about history (and sadly little about the future). But study mathematics --- and all doors will be open to you in natural sciences and sometimes even beyond them. Software development, sociology, even linguistics --- they will all welcome you, because you will be speaking their language.

Homer Simpson ‘Higgs Boson’ Prediction Eerily Accurate 14 Years Before CERN

The Higgs Boson particle – that so-called ‘God Particle’ (sigh) which gives other particles mass – was predicted by Professor Peter Higgs in 1964 et al, and its existence first confirmed in 2013 by the team at CERN.

And 14 years earlier, Homer Simpson got there first….

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