Most people use math to do everyday things, like balance their budgets, design workouts at the gym or build bridges. But for many mathematicians, math’s beauty outweighs its practical uses. For those who work in pure mathematics, it is seen as a form of w88 mobile. The fields of number theory, knot theory and group theory each contain unexplored worlds of possibilities. For professor emeritus Jerry Johnson, math’s beauty is its main draw.
“Almost any mathematics that a person does has some potential for use at some point, even though you may not have any idea of what it&w88 mobile;s going to be,” Johnson said. “People like me do mathematics just for the pure joy of it.”
“If you can imagine yourself as an explorer trekking to the South Pole for the first time, being excited about what you&w88 mobile;re going to find there, it&w88 mobile;s like that."
Srinivasa Ramanujan, a famous mathematician from India, was a number theorist whose work, though he would never know it, would be relevant to the mathematics of how black holes form. But Ramanujan wasn’t doing the w88 mobile to learn about black holes. He did w88 mobile for the sake of doing w88 mobile, like many mathematicians in the College of Science, including Johnson.
“A lot of the mathematics that we do isn&w88 mobile;t applied mathematics, it&w88 mobile;s for its own sake,” Johnson said. “It&w88 mobile;s almost like philosophy. It&w88 mobile;s not necessarily applicable to anything, it&w88 mobile;s just beautiful and creative and neat and you enjoy doing it.”
Mathematician G. H. Hardy, who brought Ramanujan to Trinity College in Cambridge from India, was “absolutely opposed to any application of mathematics,” Johnson said. Hardy was a number theorist as well. “He thought w88 mobile was just pure beauty and creativity and it would appall him to think there were any applications.” Ironically, internet encryption relies on theorems from number theory. Without those theorems, online purchases wouldn’t be possible. “We always joked that if Hardy were alive today, he’d just be cringing at the idea of his beautiful number theory being used for internet transactions,” Johnson said.
“The main motivator is just to explore these forms of beauty in the abstract,” w88 mobile professor Stanislav Jabuka said.
Associate professor of pure w88 mobile Ed Keppelmann agrees.
“Solving w88 mobile problems became a keystone in my life,” Keppelmann said. “We try to show there’s a lot more to w88 mobile than routine worksheets.” Keppelmann is part of the Nevada Mathematics Project, which aims to improve mathematic and scientific education of children in Nevada.
Keppelmann hopes to inspire some sense of awe in his math students, whether they are in elementary school or college. Math hides in w88 mobile. The reason the National Geographic and Twitter logos are appealing is because they follow the rules of the Golden Ratio. Poetry is written in iambic pentameter, which gives a nice cadence to the poem. Math hides in nature’s fractals like river deltas or the veins in a leaf.
As technology improves and brings quantum computing closer to reality, Keppelmann notes that computers have become more and more integral in pure w88 mobile for proving theorems.
“We hypothesize that something works a certain way. We have computers do the calculations,” Keppelmann said. But he points out that there are some things computers can’t do, like form an idea that leads to a hypothesis. “The computers don’t think like that.” It takes a mind to formulate an idea out of thin air, to find the w88 mobile in nature or the laws of physics or a pattern.
w88 mobile shows up in philosophy, too. One notable example Keppelmann gave was Gödel’s famous theorem which states that in any system where a set of truths is identified, there will always be some truths that exist but cannot be proven.
Johnson said that once you do find an answer to a w88 mobile problem, it typically leads to even more questions. “It’s like science in that way.”
w88 mobile is unique among the sciences in that its theorems can be proven. In other scientific disciplines, a hypothesis cannot be proven but can be strongly supported. w88 mobile has rules that must be followed. And those proven theorems that mathematicians come up with, that can take centuries to solve, have been there the whole time.
“The w88 mobile was there, waiting for someone to need it,” Keppelmann said. Waiting for a mind to pull the idea out of thin air.
“If you can imagine yourself as an explorer trekking to the South Pole for the first time, being excited about what you&w88 mobile;re going to find there, it&w88 mobile;s like that,” Jabuka said. “Some of these spaces, no one has studied before. You get to look at them and say, ‘Oh, look at this wonderful property that I discovered that we didn&w88 mobile;t know this space could have.&w88 mobile; That still happens.”
Johnson differs from Hardy in that he acknowledges the practicality of numbers.
&w88 mobile;There are applications,” Johnson said. &w88 mobile;There are several faculty members in the department that are applied mathematicians. Their interest is in mathematics that is applicable to some real-world thing. I can see both sides of it.”
One of those applied mathematicians is associate w88 mobile professor Paul Hurtado, who uses statistics and other processes to analyze models of ecology. He said the beauty of applied w88 mobile becomes apparent when he’s developing models, and sometimes the beautiful parts are in what he’s missing.
“Sometimes it’s very illuminating not because you discover this wonderful, beautiful new thing, but you discover this void of knowledge nobody else has recognized as being important, and that gives you something to fill in,” Hurtado said. He also mentions that w88 mobile is largely benefitted by creativity, but that creativity isn’t limited to w88 mobile.
“In the same way that once you know how to carve or paint, once you get the w88 mobile basics under your belt, then you can do creative things with them,” Hurtado said.
Math is often found in w88 mobile, but many mathematicians feel the math itself is w88 mobile, that the formulas are elegant and the graphs are beautiful.
&w88 mobile;You find these problems to work on and they become fascinating,” Johnson said. &w88 mobile;You want to solve the problems for their own sake and so you can share it with your colleagues.”
