Strogatz' Math Column Debuts in The New York Times

February 11, 2010 

Steven Strogatz's column on mathematics debuted on the Times Online on January 31, 2010.

"I’ll be writing about the elements of mathematics, from pre-school to grad school, for anyone out there who’d like to have a second chance at the subject—but this time from an adult perspective. It’s not intended to be remedial. The goal is to give you a better feeling for what math is all about and why it’s so enthralling to those who get it," said Strogatz (Cornell University).

Raising several questions—Where exactly do numbers come from? Did humanity invent them? Or did they discover them?—Strogatz noted that after humans decided what the numbers mean, they had no say in how numbers behave. 

"Numbers obey certain laws and have certain properties, personalities, and ways of combining with one another, and there’s nothing we can do about it except watch and try to understand. In that sense they are eerily reminiscent of atoms and stars, the things of this world," said Strogatz.

That they're part heaven and part earth is the feature that makes numbers so useful. "It is what the physicist Eugene Wigner had in mind when he wrote of 'the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences," he claimed.

So, just as numbers are a shortcut for counting by ones, addition is a shortcut for counting by any amount. "This is how mathematics grows. The right abstraction leads to new insight, and new power," observed Strogatz.

"In mathematics, we’ll see in the coming weeks, our freedom lies in the questions we ask--and in how we pursue them," concluded Strogatz. Read more Strogatz columns in the Times here. 

Source: The New York Times (January 31, 2010)