Salon.com > David Appell

Math = beauty + truth / (really hard)

Thu, 05 Sep 2002 19:30:00 +0000

There is no Nobel Prize for mathematicians, the story goes, because of a love affair.

Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite who established the prizes to spruce up his image, refused to endow a prize in mathematics because his wife was having an affair with the Swedish mathematician Gosta Magnus Mittag-Leffler. Nobel was afraid a math prize would be awarded to the mathematician-cum-Romeo, and so the mathematics community has forever been excluded from the most recognized award in all of science.

Alas, the story is not true. Nobel never married and by all accounts was quite a lonely man. But his oversight may perhaps be why mathematicians get so little press. That, and the fact that non-mathematicians have no clue what they're up to.

"Most people are so frightened of the name of mathematics that they are quite ready, quite unaffectedly, to exaggerate their own mathematical stupidity," said the English number theorist G.H. Hardy. But admit it: Whether you left math after a humiliating D in high school trigonometry or crawled away, exhausted and defeated, from a year of college calculus, you've always suspected that, deep down, mathematics rules the world.

The next Newton?

Wed, 15 May 2002 21:26:00 +0000

Stephen Wolfram wants to bring science into the age of the computer. A boy genius turned multimillionaire scientist, Wolfram has been a veritable recluse for the last decade while developing his new approach to fundamental physics. He runs his software company, Wolfram Research, largely by videoconference calls from his home, allowing himself the latitude to pursue his research on the subject of complexity. He views the future of science as one dominated by the computer, one where scientists run experiments via the keyboard, unraveling the vast complexities of the natural world through relatively simple rules of programming.

Wolfram is a maestro of this new world, a Moby of a scientist who has looked deep into the standard way of doing science and who sees the sparkling of a new dawn. His just-published magnum opus, "A New Kind of Science," is his Principia, a response to the deterministic mathematics that Isaac Newton used to render science into a tidy picture of elliptical orbits and parabolic arcs, predictable to as many decimal points as you please.

“It Ain’t Necessarily So” by David Murray, et al.

Mon, 02 Jul 2001 18:02:00 +0000

Journalists are the whipping boys of the information age, and lord knows they deserve it. Operating in a world far too subtle and complex to be reduced to their paltry formulas, they misinterpret statistics, misunderstand research and mishandle the truth, usually in service of their own political and social objectives. They choose topics that advance their liberal agenda and ignore any truths that defy it. They decide which angle to cover and which perspectives to suppress, who's on the side of good and who's sold their soul to the devil. You can trust them about as far as you can throw them, and given how slippery they are, that sure isn't very far.

But have no fear, for experts have arrived to set us straight, in the form of the Statistical Assessment Service -- STATS for short. As part of its noble service, STATS offers us the new book "It Ain't Necessarily So: How Media Make and Unmake the Scientific Picture of Reality" by David Murray, Joel Schwartz and S. Robert Lichter, a trio of social scientists. The book gets to the scientific heart of the journalistic matter, unraveling dozens of science stories that have appeared in print over the last 10 years to reveal "the means by which savvy news consumers can defend themselves."