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Pure Math, Pure Joy
e271828 writes "The New York Times is carrying a nice little piece entitled Pure Math, Pure Joy about the beauty and applicability of pure math as carried out at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. There is an accompanying slideshow of pictures of mathematicians in action; I particularly loved the picture titled Waging Mental Battle with a Proof."
I work in the maths department of a University, and yes.. it's very much like this. We sit around all day in small groups, staring at blackboards, "battling with proofs". Just like in that wonderful movie with the violent australian, "A Beautiful Mind".
No.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
My (insert close relative here) does minimal surfaces and hangs out with some of these guys. They look far too neatly dressed in the pictures. Anyway, for a good time, you might want to take a look at some of the galleries of images that these crazy minimal surfaces guys do. I remember about ten years ago, one of my (insert close relative)'s colleagues sold a few images to the Grateful Dead for their concerts.
http://www.msri.org/publications/sgp/jim/images/
http://www.gang.umass.edu/
There is another site out at Minnesota but I'm too lazy to look for it today.
"the beauty of this is that it is absolutely useless to anybody"
You're screwin' up the causal relationships again.
Pure math isn't a thing of beauty because discoveries yielded by it may have no *immediate* practicable value; nor is it a thing of beauty because it may be sourced in something other than a desire to solve an immediate problem.
It's a thing of beauty because it has produced fascinating finds with respect to the relationships between various prime numbers and relatively prime numbers (Euler's Totient function). Modular exponentiation is fascinating--how this works with primes (i.e. 3^1 mod 7 = 3; 3^2 mod 7 = 2; 3^3 mod 7 = 6; 3^4 mod 7 = 4; 3^5 mod 7 = 5; 3^6 mod 7 = 1; 3^7 mod 7 = 3 and it all REPEATs) -- so is fast exponentiation, exponential inverses, modular inverses, Fermat's little theory etc.
That some of these finds combine to yield one-way (trapdoor) functions that can take advantage of the inability (for now!) to factor large numbers and provide a secure pub key system is a bonus of monumental importance. And one that was only just recently (past 30 years or so) realized.
You can never know if a thing will be useful or not without understanding the essence of that thing; and there again "useful" is clearly a time-limited function... As one cannot perfectly predict future needs and future landscapes, one cannot perfectly determine at any one point of time whether current work in number theory will be with or without practical value. Though what's so wrong with discovery for discovery's sake! Isn't that part of the reason we are here?
Those who give up their power willingly deserve none.
You certainly don't know what you are talking about. Some tests are public and some even free.
For instance, here (Mensa Spain) you have a test publicly available.
And there are some books also publicly available sold as Mensa preparatory test books.
And that's not all, they sent me home a test (which I never filled), with solutions.
So, who is the liar?
The title of the article is "Pure Math, Pure Joy" and it's about MSRI. While it is a phenomenal place, it is no picnic for young mathematicians for sure and is often referred to as "misery", as in "yeah, I spent a year in misery (MSRI)".
For the love of $DEITY, loose != not win!!!!!