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Sludent My Degree Audi Mail- lsh Plans Follow-up and reports Participants More What's so sexy about math? (Bonus discussion) Watch the TED Talk by Dr. Cédric Villani: What's so sexy about math? htt (About 17 minutes long) You may want to turn on subtitles if you find his accent difcult hen in a posting of about two paragraphs, comment on one or two of the points made by Dr. Villanl,such as: The basics of the Gauss Curve (also called the Normal Distribution) Math makes us view and understand things beyond our intuition Google uses sophisticated algoriths like PageRank to conduct searches Our increasing digital world requires more and more math . Dr. Villani had a perplexing problem, slept on it, and then got the answer. Post by Sunday midnight. You are not required to respond to classmates for this posting, but you may if Click on POST HERE to begin.Explanation / Answer
Dr. Villani discussed what makes Mathematics an exciting discipline by bringing to focus some of its striking contribution towards human understanding of nature and its hidden rules behind some of phenomena, which would seem intractable on first glance. Dr. Villani cites some interestinge examples wherein Mathematics helped humans think beyond intuition. While earth would seem infinite to early civilizations as they did not have means to explore the world like modern man. Through mathematical arguments, Eratosthenes was able to demonstrate that earth had finite circumfreence and also calculated it. The ability to find a relationship among observations and argue about it systematically leads to many invaluable insights. Our intution demands to believe in what we see and we are able to extrapolate from relationships-- what we already think to be true. However, mathematics helps us uncover new relationships and thus helps us discover new laws of nature. Newton was able to decipher Earth's flatness at poles by observing that pendulums swing at different rates at different locations and this seems to vary by distance of that location from poles.
Modern day applications of mathematics are even more interesting and invaluable. Googles page rank algorithm for example started out by calculating how much visits a page would accumulate through random visits which occur due to the page being referred at other pages on internet. Intuitively, it may seem that we just need to count number pages referring a page, however, we also need to take into account how pages are connected-- and here mathematics comes to help. There are many more applications in the Digital world driven by internet, which generates huge amount of data about people and their interactions with products and services delivered through internet.
Gauss' curve to describe distribution of errors from mean is a common distribution/theme that keeps on recurring at heart of many problems in mathematics. For example it describes number of air molecules hitting you per second even if phenomena is random the statistics for number of hits is known. Mathematicians often work on perplexing problems like this: Dr. Villani for example worked on Landau damping trying to derive mathematical basis for plasma electric field settling to original value after perturbation. He described how he slept at 4 am in the morning thinking of the Landau damping solution. He had tried everything he knew, but somehow it remained unsolved till wee hours in the morning. He woke up thinking about the same problem; His unconscious brain had continued to work on it while he was asleep.It is but exceptional beauty and appeal of Mathematics that keeps mathematicians working on it seeking deep relationships, hidden laws, symmetries and grand design that fuels our daily lives and the very nature itself.
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