Mathematics is the Pursuit of Beauty
This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.
Manjul Bhargava, who has loved mathematics for as long as he can remember, created and solved his first algebra problem at age seven, stacking oranges into a triangular pyramid and trying to figure out how many he would need if he had n oranges on one side. "I still remember the answer," he says. "It's n (n + 1) (n + 2)/6."
While his solution might well mystify many of us, it nevertheless was an easy and auspicious start for Bhargava, a National Science Foundation-funded scientist and math whiz who, 10 years ago at age 28, became the second youngest full professor in the history of Princeton University, and who has solved math problems that have stymied some of the best mathematicians in the world.
He figured out, for example, the answer to a problem that had eluded the legendary Carl Friedrich Gauss (), a German regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. In addition, Bhargava and one of his students have made progress on another problem, one of the seven "Millennium Problems" of the Clay Mathematics I
Manjul Bhargava
Manjul Bhargava is the R. Brandon Fradd Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University. He earned his A.B. in Mathematics from Harvard University in and Ph.D. from Princeton University in After a year each at the Institute for Advanced Study and Harvard University, he joined the faculty at Princeton University as Professor of Mathematics in He was the first five-year Research Fellow of the Clay Mathematics Institute during , and is currently a Simons Foundation Fellow.
His primary research interests lie in number theory, representation theory, and arithmetic geometry. His research includes the study of integer values taken by quadratic forms, composition laws on spaces of higher degree forms, and rational points on &#;elliptic curves&#; (i.e., rational solutions (x,y) to equations of the form y^2 = x^3 + A x + B).
I attended the Lecture on "Sanskrit and Mathematics" by Fields Medallist Manjul Bhargava at the Kuppuswami Sastri Research Institute, Mylapore, which is part of the Sanskrit college. The following is my collection of notes, which I typed as he spoke.
Begin Notes
I thought I'd be meeting a small set of students and here is a full house, he begins.
Rich literature in Sanskrit, which is disappearing. Europeans preserving Latin and Greek. Most nations, Germany France Japan South Korea, teach science and math in local languages, one source of their wealth. They use English as second language. It's much easier to learn concepts in local language at young age. Lucky my grandfather was a Sanskrit scholar. At home we had a great library of classical Sanskrit texts. I learnt the Sulba Sutra as a child, before learning from Western books in mathematics.
Pingala Chanda Sastra. I learnt a lot from Pingala. We have to do this scientifically, good translations, bring these alive in schools in correct accurate way. Repeats the phrase "correct accurate" several times.
(Brief interruption because some people can't hear properly. Actually I can hear, they may have a problem wi
The Mathemagician: Field&#;s Medal winner Manjul Bhargava bridges tradition and modernity
(July 6, ) In the summer of , Manjul Bhargava&#;s eye caught a mini Rubik&#;s cube sitting in a corner of his room. He began visualising numbers on each of the corners and in his own words, &#;saw binary quadratic forms coming out, three of them.&#; Bhargava, who was a student at Harvard University then, wrote down the relations between them and realised he had found a description of Gauss&#; Law (which explains how electric fields behave around charged objects). He linked it to the work of the ancient mathematician Brahmagupta, which he had read in Sanskrit as a child. It was one of Bhargava’s first major breakthroughs, which paved the way for his winning the Fields Medal in
To Bhargava, Math is music, and poetry and patterns – and magic. He brings this playfulness to his lectures at Princeton too, where he became the youngest ever full mathematics professor at the age of In class, he is known to use magic tricks, puzzles, toys, poetry and music, which he believes &#;should all form a key part of the mathematics classroom. When people see mathematics done as described above, as a play
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