No, really. This time it’s true. Just wait.
Our favourite mathematics populariser at the moment is Evelyn Lamb. Lamb’s YouTube videos are great because they don’t exist. Evelyn Lamb is a writer. (That is not Lamb in the photo above. We’ll get there.)
It is notoriously difficult to write good popular mathematics (whatever one might mean by “popular”). It is very easy to drown a mathematics story in equations and technical details. But, in trying to avoid that error, the temptation then is to cheat and to settle for half-truths, or to give up entirely and write maths-free fluff. And then there’s the writing, which must be engaging and crystal clear. There are very few people who know enough of mathematics and non-mathematicians and words, and who are willing to sweat sufficiently over the details, to make it all work.
Of course the all-time master of popular mathematics was Martin Gardner, who wrote the Mathematical Games column in Scientific American for approximately three hundred years. Gardner is responsible for inspiring more teenagers to become mathematicians than anyone else, by an order of magnitude. If you don’t know of Martin Gardner then stop reading and go buy this book. Now!
Evelyn Lamb is not Martin Gardner. No one is. But she is very good. Lamb writes the mathematics blog Roots of Unity for Scientific American, and her posts are often surprising, always interesting, and very well written.
That is all by way of introduction to a lovely post that Lamb wrote last week in honour of Julia Robinson, who would have turned 100 on December 8. That is Robinson in the photo above. Robinson’s is one of the great, and very sad, stories of 20th century mathematics.
Robinson worked on Diophantine equations, polynomial equations with integer coefficients and where we’re hunting for integer solutions. So, for example, the equation x2 + y2 = z2 is Diophantine with the integer solution (3,4,5), as well as many others. By contrast, the Diophantine equation x2 + y2 = 3 clearly has no integer solutions.
Robinson did groundbreaking work on Hilbert’s 10th problem, which asks if there exists an algorithm to determine whether a Diophantine equation has (integer) solutions. Robinson was unable to solve Hilbert’s problem. In 1970, however, building on the work of Robinson and her collaborators, the Russian mathematician Yuri Matiyasevich was able solve the problem in the negative: no such algorithm exists. And the magic key that allowed Matiyasevich to complete Robinson’s work was … wait for it … Fibonacci numbers.
Label the Fibonacci numbers as follows:
F1 =1, F2 = 1, F3 = 2, F4 = 3, F5 = 5, F6 = 8, …
It turns out that with this labelling the Fibonacci numbers have the following weird property:
If Fn2 divides Fm then Fn divides m.
You can check what this is saying with n = 3 and m = 6. (We haven’t been able to find a proof online to which to link.) How does that help solve Hilbert’s problem? Read Lamb’s post, and her more bio-ish article in Science News, and find out.
Marti,
You are right about MG. Reason enough to read Scientific American for his articles alone.
I recall liking his articles on Nim,Hex and Penrose Tiling as a student
He was interviewed by Alex Bellos in 2010 in the Guardian
No sign of Mathematica or tablets at that time?
Steve R
https://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in-numberland/2014/oct/21/martin-gardner-mathematical-puzzles-birthday
I never read Scientific American, but I ran into a collection of Gardner’s columns in my school library when I was in about Year 10, and happily made hexaflexagons for the next week. I would hazard a guess (except it’s not a guess) that most current school libraries would not possess any books by Gardner.
Hi,
I am sure MG would have liked this puzzle from last weeks new scientist
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24432590-700-new-scientist-puzzle-33-the-mountain-pass/
It’s the sort of question my math teacher would give to the class as a puzzle to solve over the weekend in year 7
A hint can be found on the Qedcat movie page links
http://www.math.harvard.edu/~knill/mathmovies/swf/league.html
Steve R
Nice!
Notably, Gardner also had his skeptical and grumpy side. Gardner was too much of a gentleman to have enjoyed something like this blog, but I think he would have appreciated some of the choices of targets.
If the shelf behind my desk counts, my school has a few MG books… never enough though. The flexagons are just wonderful (and really geometrically puzzle me each time I go back to think about the different models)
Nope, your shelf doesn’t count. But, next time you’re in the staffroom, you can check how many of your fellow maths teachers have ever even heard of Gardner.
Already done recently. Answer not so good. One. And he’s more of a Physics teacher. Interestingly enough, only person to also have copies of Fitzpatrick and Galbraith in home library. Correlation, perhaps?
Colour me shocked.
Brian Hayes used to write a great column in American Scientist (not Scientific American).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Hayes_(scientist)
I remember talking to the super graph theory math/CS professor date. And I mentioned one (with caveats that it was popular) that was in her field. Despite the caveats she was sure it was rubbish. Showed it to her and she grudgingly said…”that one’s pretty decent.”
The professor was correct to guess it would be rubbish. It’s playing the odds. (Lamb has also had her bad moments.)