Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality

Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality

Edward Frenkel

Language: English

Pages: 304

ISBN: 0465064957

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


A New York Times Science Bestseller

What if you had to take an art class in which you were only taught how to paint a fence? What if you were never shown the paintings of van Gogh and Picasso, weren’t even told they existed? Alas, this is how math is taught, and so for most of us it becomes the intellectual equivalent of watching paint dry.

In Love and Math, renowned mathematician Edward Frenkel reveals a side of math we’ve never seen, suffused with all the beauty and elegance of a work of art. In this heartfelt and passionate book, Frenkel shows that mathematics, far from occupying a specialist niche, goes to the heart of all matter, uniting us across cultures, time, and space.

Love and Math tells two intertwined stories: of the wonders of mathematics and of one young man’s journey learning and living it. Having braved a discriminatory educational system to become one of the twenty-first century’s leading mathematicians, Frenkel now works on one of the biggest ideas to come out of math in the last 50 years: the Langlands Program. Considered by many to be a Grand Unified Theory of mathematics, the Langlands Program enables researchers to translate findings from one field to another so that they can solve problems, such as Fermat’s last theorem, that had seemed intractable before.

At its core, Love and Math is a story about accessing a new way of thinking, which can enrich our lives and empower us to better understand the world and our place in it. It is an invitation to discover the magic hidden universe of mathematics.

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along with a number of other top mathematicians, trying to alleviate the effect of the discrimination against Jewish students by privately teaching young talented kids who were denied entry to MGU. As part of those efforts, Fuchs was involved in what became known as “Jewish People’s University,” an unofficial evening school, where he and his colleagues gave courses of lectures to students. Some of those lectures had even been held at Kerosinka, although this was before my time. The school had

of the Solution 6Apprentice Mathematician 7The Grand Unified Theory 8Magic Numbers 9Rosetta Stone 10Being in the Loop 11Conquering the Summit 12Tree of Knowledge 13Harvard Calling 14Tying the Sheaves of Wisdom 15A Delicate Dance 16Quantum Duality 17Uncovering Hidden Connections 18Searching for the Formula of Love Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Glossary of Terms Index Preface There’s a secret world out there. A hidden parallel universe of beauty and elegance, intricately

had seen before does not come easily. It is usually the product of months, if not years, of hard work. Little by little, the inkling of a new phenomenon or a theory emerges, and at first you don’t believe it yourself. But then you say: “what if it’s true?” You try to test the idea by doing sample calculations. Sometimes these calculations are hard, and you have to navigate through mountains of heavy formulas. The probability of making a mistake is very high, and if it does not work at first, you

mathematical research by a large injection of funds into a promising area sounded appealing and exciting. We simply couldn’t say no. The next question was what we should focus on in our project. The Langlands Program, as we have seen, is multi-faceted and relevant to many fields of mathematics. It would be easy to write half a dozen proposals on this general topic. We had to make a choice, and we decided to focus on what we thought was the biggest mystery: the potential link between the

analogue of the charge of the electron). And what will the gauge group be in the dual theory? It turns out to be LG, the Langlands dual group of the group G. Goddard, Nuyts, and Olive discovered it by performing a detailed analysis of the electric and magnetic charges in the gauge theory with a gauge group G. In electromagnetism, which is the gauge theory with the gauge group being the circle group, the values of both charges are integers. When we exchange them, one set of integers gets

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