THE BEAUTY OF MATHEMATICS

Here is an interesting and lovely way to look at the beauty of mathematics, and of God, the sum of all wonders.

1x8+1=9 12 x 8 + 2 = 98 123 x 8 + 3 = 987 1234 x 8 + 4 = 9876 12345 x 8 + 5 = 987 65 123456 x 8 + 6 = 987654 1234567 x 8 + 7 = 9876543 12345678 x 8 + 8 = 98765432 123456789 x 8 + 9 = 987654321 1 12 123 1234 12345 123456 1234567 12345678 123456789 9 98 987 9876 98765 987654 9876543 98765432 x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 +2= +3= +4= +5= +6= +7= +8= +9= +10= + + + + + + + + 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 = = = = = = = = 11 111 1111 11111 111111 1111111 11111111 111111111 1111111111 88 888 8888 88888 888888 8888888 88888888 888888888

Brilliant, isnt it? And look at this symmetry: 1x1 11 x 11 111 x 111 1111 x 1111 11111 x 11111 111111 x 111111 1111111 x 1111111 11111111 x 11111111 111111111 x 111111111 = = = = = = = = = 1 121 12321 1234321 123454321 12345654321 1234567654321 123456787654321 12345678987654321

Now, take a look at this 101% From a strictly mathematical viewpoint:

What Equals 100%? What does it mean to give MORE than 100%? Ever wonder about those people who say they are giving more than 100%? We have all been in situations where someone wants you to GIVE OVER 100%. How about ACHIEVING 101%? What equals 100% in life? Heres a little mathematical formula that might help Answer these questions: If: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ Is represented as: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26. If: H-A-R-D-W-O-R- K 8+1+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98% And: K-N-O-W-L-E-D-G-E 11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = 96% But: A-T-T-I-T-U-D-E 1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100%

THEN, look how far the love of God will take you: L-O-V-E-O-F-G-O-D 12+15+22+5+15+6+7+15+4 = 101%

The Unreasonable Beauty of Mathematics [Slide Show]

Mathematical structures both natural and man-made dazzle the eye
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Image: Tom Beddard Why Math Works

If you shut yourself in a room and devise some abstract mathematics for the sake of sheer intellectual fascination, you might not expect your scribblings to have any relevance to the real world. Your parents would probably bug you about what you were doing with your life. And yet time and again, scientists find that the creations of pure thought match what they discover in nature. Does it mean the world at its deepest levels is somehow mathematical? Does it simply mean that scientists are good at cherrypicking the conceptual tools they need? Mathematicians, physicists, philosophers and others debate that question, as astrophysicist Mario Livio describes in the August issue of Scientific American. Whatever the answer may be, we can still marvel at the beauty of mathematical structures.

Mathematical beauty describes the notion that some mathematicians may derive aesthetic pleasure from their work, and frommathematics in general. They express this pleasure by describing mathematics (or, at least, some aspect of mathematics) as beautiful. Sometimes mathematicians describe mathematics as an art form or, at a minimum, as a creative activity. Comparisons are often made with music and poetry. Bertrand Russell expressed his sense of mathematical beauty in these words: Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.[1] Paul Erds expressed his views on the ineffability of mathematics when he said, "Why are numbers beautiful? It's like asking why isBeethoven's Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don't see why, someone can't tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren't beautiful, nothing is."[2]

When you hear the word math, what comes to mind? Do you think drill and kill? Boring? Nerdy? Memorization? Plug and chug formulas? Calculators? Computers? Answers that are either right or wrong?

The Tale of Archimedes and Displacement

Take for instance the story of the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes who discovered the principal of displacement. As the story goes, King Hieron II of Syracuse had commissioned a goldsmith to craft a crown from a hunk of gold. The king, however, thought that the goldsmith had taken some of the gold for himself and replaced it with silver. King Hieron II summoned Archimedes and asked him to prove whether his suspicion was true or not. Archimedes thought long and hard, but was unable to come up with an immediate solution. According to the story, Archimedes went to take a bath and noticed that the water rose as he entered the tub. Excited and delighted by the idea of displacement, Archimedes then went running down the street naked shouting Eureka!

Solving a Math Problem Can Be Thrilling

Of course, I am not suggesting that students go running down the street naked upon discovering the solution to a challenging problem. But sharing such a story with students might help convey how thrilling and rewarding it is to make a discovery through careful observation of the world around us. As mathematician Shmuel Avital once wrote: To break the image of mathematics as a boring subject we can add color and enliven it by considering its human side and from time to time expose students to anecdotes from the lives of mathematicians. In some cases, such anecdotes can even help solve educational problems.

Eye of the Beholder

The beauty and elegance of mathematics may also be further explored in the classroom. Take, for instance, conic sections. The aesthetic of these shapes can be attributed to a large extent to their mathematical properties. In fact, when these shapes were first examined in 300 B.C. by Euclid, he studied them because of the sheer beauty of their inherent mathematics. It was only later that elliptical orbits or properties of projectile motion were discovered to be related to conic sections. Students should be aware that many mathematicians experience aesthetic pleasures in their mathematical pursuits. At a minimum, math can be considered a creative activity, for many it is seen as an art form. While we often think of math as a natural counterpart to science, many also compare it to music or poetry in its elegance. Bertrand Russell demonstrated his passion for mathematics when he stated: The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry. Some have even gone further to show how mathematics encompasses everything: "Mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe." Here are some related lessons that may help explore the drama and beauty of math.

Math Lessons:

Displacement and Density Students explore displacement. In this displacement and density lesson, students find the volume of irregular shaped objects. Afterwards, they determine the volume of containers. Students compute the amount of water displaced. Cardboard Boat Challenge Students build a boat out of cardboard and tape. They apply Archimedes' Principle to their design Parabolic Food Fight Students catapult grapes with a spoon and determine the mathematics of that event. The location of the grapes at various points of its flight path is charted to determine the curve of best fit. Getting in Focus Students relate the real-world application of an ambulance route to ellipses. They determine the equation of an ellipse given foci as well as other concepts pertaining to ellipses.

The Natural Beauty of Math

The Geometrization Theorem may not sound the sexiest, but it reveals geometrys innate splendor

In arts or literature, perhaps, beauty may have lost its currency in recent years as a standard of judgment or criterion for excellence, regarded as too subjective or culturally mediated. For mathematicians, however, beauty as an eternal verity has never gone out of fashion. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in this world for ugly mathematics, wrote British number theorist Godfrey Hardy in 1941.

To get a taste of mathematical beauty, begin by heading to your favorite pub and ordering a frosty mug of beer. Place it on a paper place mat three times, forming three rings of condensationmaking certain to do so in such a way that all three rings intersect at one point. Now ask your companions: How large a mug would one need to cover the other three intersection points? One nearly always assumes that only a gargantuan mug would serve that purpose. The surprise answer: the same mug! Its a completely foolproof solution. (See figure left for two equally valid solutions; in each case, the solid circles are the first three rings; the dashed circle is the fourth ring, representing the mug covering the other three intersection points.) This theorem was published by Roger A. Johnson in 1916. Johnsons circle theorem demonstrates two of the essential requirements for mathematical beauty. First, it is surprising. You dont expect the same-sized circle to show up again in the solution. Second, it is simple. The mathematical concepts involved, circles and radii, are basic ones that have stood the test of time. However, Johnsons theorem comes up short in the beauty department in one salient respect. The best theorems are also deep, containing many layers of meaning, and revealing more as you learn more about them. What mathematical facts live up to this high standard of beauty? German mathematician Stefan Friedl has argued in favor of Grigory Perelmans Geometrization Theorem, for which the proof was set forth only in 2003. The theorem, which created a sensation in the world of mathematicians, advances a key step in the classification of three-dimensional topological spaces. (You can think of these spaces as possible alternate universes.) The Geometrization Theorem, Friedl avers, is an object of stunning beauty. Boiled down to its simplest terms, it states that most universes have a natural geometric structure different from the one we learn in high school. These alternate universes are not Euclidean, or flat. The question has to do with the curvature of space itself. There are various ways of explaining what this means; the most precise one mathematically is to say that alternate universes are hyperbolic, or negatively curved, rather than flat.

Mathematicians are only beginning to grapple with the implications. Astrophysical data indicate that our own universe is flat. Yet in these alternate universes, flatness is not the natural state. According to Perelmans theorem, our apparently flat universe constitutes a surprising exception. Another reason that the theorem attracted international publicity has to do with the mathematician himself. In 2010, the reclusive Russian declined a million-dollar prize for his breakthrough from the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Obviously, for Perelman, mathematical beauty was not something that could be bought and paid for. Changing our understanding of the universe was reward enough.

It is known that mathematicians see beauty in mathematics. Many mathematicians are motivated to find the most beautiful proof, and often they refer to mathematics as a form of art. They are apt to say What a beautiful theorem, Such an elegant proof. In this article, I will not elaborate on the beauty of mathematics, but rather the mathematics of beauty, i.e., the mathematics behind beauty, and how mathematical notions can be used to express beautythe beauty of manmade creations, as well as the beauty of nature. I will give four examples of beautiful objects and will discuss the mathematics behind them. Can the beautiful object be created as a solution of a mathematical formula or question? Moreover, I shall explore the general question of whether visual experience and beauty can be formulated with mathematical notions. I will start with a classical example from architecture dating back to the Renaissance, move to mosaic art, then to crystals in nature, then to an example from my line of research on braids, and conclude with the essence of visual experience. The shape of a perfect room was defined by the architects of the Renaissance to be a rectangular-shaped room that has a certain ratio among its wallsthey called it the golden section. A rectangular room with the golden-section ratio also has the property that the ratio between the sum of the lengths of its two walls (the longer one and the shorter one) to the length of its longer wall is also the golden section, 1 plus the square root of 5 over 2. Architects today still believe that the most harmonious rooms have a golden-section ratio. This number appears in many mathematical phenomena and constructions (e.g., the limit of the Fibonacci sequence). Leonardo da Vinci observed the golden section in well-proportioned human bodies and faces in Western culture and in some other civilizations the golden-section ratio of a wellproportioned human body resides between the upper part (above the navel) and the lower part (below the navel).

Mosaic is an art form where solid pieces (wood, stone, glass, etc.) are assembled on a flat surface with no overlaps and no gaps. In its sophisticated form, the mosaic has recognizable patterns, which are repeated in two different directions, where no center, no boundary, no preferred direction, and no focus, is identified. The pattern of a mosaic work gives a sense of infinity. In mathematical terms, mosaics are referred to as tiling. To form a tiling means to fully cover a two-dimensional plane with geometric forms (polygons or shapes bounded by curves) with no overlaps. A tiling is called symmetric if one can virtually rotate it or reflect it without causing the tiling picture to change. There are different angles of rotation (half twist, quarter twist, etc.) and different axes of mirror reflection (horizontal, vertical, diagonal, etc.). A rich mosaic represents a variety of tiling symmetries, which can be understood via the resulting geometry. The most impressive mosaics in history were done by artists working in the Islamic World in the Middle Ages, and, in particular, those who created the beautiful, sophisticated mosaic of the Alhambra Palace in Spain. The Alhambra was built by the Moors in the beginning of the thirteen century, on a red-soil hill overlooking the old city of Granada. It is a showcase of Muslim architecture and design with an immense wealth of patterns, ornaments, calligraphy, and stone carvings. It includes virtual night-sky ceilings crafted from thousands of pieces of wood, as well as the most sophisticated, gorgeous, colorful mosaics. The Dutch artist M. C. Escher paid two visits to the Alhambra to sketch and catalogue the ornate patterns that are found in the tilings throughout the palace and surrounding courtyards. Eschers tilings are not necessarily periodic, meaning that the tiles appear or occur at regular intervals. In the late nineteenth century it was proven that, from a mathematical point of view, there are only seventeen possible symmetries. In the early twentieth century, it was discovered that the tilings in the Alhambra represent all possible seventeen symmetries! Hundreds of years of skilled construction, tiling, a deep respect for symmetry (as a harmonious force), and the study and knowledge of geometry (for religion as well as for commerce) resulted in all seventeen possible symmetry groups being represented on the Alhambra walls! In 1944, the assertion that all seventeen symmetries could be found there was challenged, but lately, once flexibilities of colors and interlacing were introduced, it was verified again.

Crystals in nature (e.g., snowflakes, minerals, precious stones) are atomically built with order and with respect to symmetry rules. They contain two, three, four, and sixfold structural symmetries, and they are periodic. Aperiodic tiling, i.e., tiling with no periodicity, was proven mathematically possible in the 1960s, but it was then believed that there were no solid structures in nature with order but with no periodicity. In 1982, Dan Shectman, a Professor at the Technion in Israel, predicted the existence of naturemade aperiodic crystals, later known as quasicrystals (left). A quasicrystal should have a polygon with five edges in its pattern. The first such nature-made stones were found in a Russian mountainous region. In 2009, this discovery was announced scientifically by Paul Steinhardt, a Professor at Princeton. In 2011, Shectman received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his prediction.

Hair Braids are referred to in mathematics as three-strand braids. In mathematics, there are also two-strand braids, four-strand braids, five-strand braids and n-strand braids, i.e., any number of strand braids. Mathematicians study the properties of braids: How do braids relate to each other? How can braids be deformed? How can braids be ordered? How can a braid be factorized? What is the structure of the group of all braids? Some of these questions are still open. I have studied the structure of braids and its dynamics for applications to geometry of surfaces, neural computation, and cryptography. Together with my student, Eran Liberman, we proved that one braid cannot always be deformed to another by conjugation. This means that one cannot move from one complex braid to another without tearing it apart. (What does this result mean for hair braids? I guess that one needs to wash his/her hair in order to make a new braid.) Da Vinci has a series of drawings of hair braids and braided rivers (right),* which are very appropriate to the dynamic nature of braids in mathematics.

Machine vision can, ideally, replace human vision, in the sense that it can identify objects in a picture. Such a machine can be of utmost help to a blind person, but it is also applicable for medical diagnostics, distance medicine, automotive safety control in an assembly line, and for robotics in general (it is indeed the last frontier in robotics). Building machine vision requires understanding of the essence of visual experience, advanced three-dimensional cameras, and more. One of the most difficult challenges for machine vision is face recognition, an essential development for administrative and legislative identification, homeland security, and the convenience of not needing to carry a key (as the home door will open automatically when approaching iteven with a hat, a smile, or sunglasses). Face recognition is one of the highest brain functions. It involves not only the shape of the face, but also the captured expression, and much more. It is culture dependent. Maybe this is the reason that while the occipital lobe of the brain is responsible for vision, face recognition is derived also with the temporal lobe. Machine face recognition does not yet match the accuracy of human face recognition, although some new technologies do surpass the average human in some performance tests. Machine face recognition can also attempt to classify beautiful faces using basic symmetries and proportions. If a machine can express our visual experience at its best (including beauty) and communicate precise visual information, it needs (not exclusively) to use mathematical notions such as: proportion, symmetry, dimension, direction, perspective, center, axes, coordinates, reflection, rotation, half-twists, order, periodicity, scale, space, cycles, intersections, continuity, intensity, density, stability, noise, as well as smoothness, curvature, projections, three-fold, and more. (Again, some of these notions were explored by da Vinci.*) In my research, I plan to use the theory of curves and surfaces embedded in a three-dimensional projective space to extract discrete invariants of the face and build supportive algorithms for face recognition. Can mathematics always explain the origin and true nature of beauty? If not, is beauty in the eyes of the beholder? I would not say that all expressions of beauty can be expressed with mathematical formulas. Nevertheless, one can still assert that beauty is an absolute term (up to cultural, geographical, and historical dependence).