University Of Cambridge Alumni

"Math was... invented to count things with. What was it then used for? ...Once you have numbers 1,2,3,4,5, and 6... and you want to start using them, you... find they're not useful for everything. You have to invent... more numbers... to include things like 0... invented around the year 0, and negative numbers were invented to deal with things like debt, and s were invented... I suppose you've got 3 fields and... 5 children, then each child will inherit 3/5 of a field. So they were invented to deal with that."

"So film, entertainment, graphic design, the retail industry uses lots of mathematicians. When you go and buy something... sadly, they're collecting data... If you go to Amazon and... buy a book, it will say, "People who bought this book also were interested in this!" ...[T]here's a mathematical algorithm that's doing that. ...It's great news for young people, because... there's vast numbers of jobs, if you stick with the maths."

"[A] lot of maths doesn't develop by solving problems of practical importance. A lot of it... develops purely out of curiosity, of from doing stuff for fun! ...You're doing maths when you do Sudoku, and it's good fun ...[S]olving puzzles ...and having fun is ...an extremely good way of doing math, probably the best way."

"[[w:Recreational mathematics|[R]ecreational math]] is a huge... subject... [A] particular favorite of mine... s and labyrinths, which were originally recreational. One of the earliest examples... involves... the ... the product of a between the queen of King and... Zeus, dressed up as a bull... turned into a bull, or whatever they do. The product... was the Minotaur... half man and half bull... [H]e was... ferocious and... lived in the center of a labyrinth underneath the palace of King Minos. ...Theseus... said I will go with the 9 young men and 9 young women and... attempt to kill the Minotaur. So when he went to Crete he was met by one of my heroes... ... the first female mathematician... recorded in the classical literature. ...[S]he gave him a sword. By the way she fell in love with him. ...[S]he also said ..."I will give you an algorithm for cracking the labyrinth ...and using this algorithm, he went into the labyrinth, found ...[and] killed the Minotaur, got out of the labyrinth and took the young men and... women back to Greece... [O]n the way he stopped off at an island... where they had a great party... and only after they had sailed off did they realize they'd left Ariadne behind, and she died of a broken heart and turned into a spider... [T]he real hero of the story is the labyrinth. ...[T]his design, although they've found it everywhere in the ancient culture, is universal. There are clear examples of Native American populations in the U.S. having essentially discovered the same design."

"Math is also developed by curiosity, and just pure abstract reasoning as well, so there's lots of ways it works."

"The way you... deal with... a problem from industry is you take all the math that you know... and you try and solve the problems with it. ...[A]fter a while you find that you've run out of math. The math that you've learned isn't enough to... solve the problem. So...you have to... invent new math, and... that new math can be... abstracted and turned into other stuff, and then... used to solve new problems, and... you look at those new problems and... find that you need new math from that... and so it... cascades, with problems generating maths, generating problems, and so on. ...[I]t's a really good virtuous circle, and this is... how math is developed over many years."

"The was... one of the first scientific research establishments in the U.K. ...They reckon about 30 elements were discovered in the Royal Institution. A number of s came out of the Royal Institution. Humphry Davy worked in the Royal Institution, the Braggs William Henry and Lawrence]... [etc.,] but possibly the most famous... was... Michael Faraday... [H]e discovered experimentally the link between electricity and magnetism and... essentially invented the and the , and those have then been developed by people like Edison and Tesla into the power generation system we so celebrate today."

"Faraday... wasn't a mathematician and so he relied on other people to do his math... and Maxwell... took Faraday's experimentally derived results, and... turned them into mathematical equations.{{center|1=\nabla \times \mathbf{E} = -\frac{\partial \mathbf{B}}{\partial t} - \mathbf{M}, \quad \nabla \times \mathbf{H} = -\frac{\partial \mathbf{D}}{\partial t} + \mathbf{J}, \nabla \cdot \mathbf{D} = \rho, \quad \nabla \cdot \mathbf{B} = 0.}} ...and these are called Maxwell's equations, and if you go to Edinburgh and you see his statue, on the base of the statue you will see these equations... which link electricity \mathbf{E} with \mathbf{B} and \mathbf{M}, which are magnetism, and \mathbf{J} is current, and \rho is charge, and these are... vector operations, and that's a derivative. ...Maxwell ...took those equations and looked for solutions, and... discovered that there were solutions... where you have an electric wave and a magnetic wave... paired... and traveling together, and he worked out the speed of those waves... exactly the speed of light. ...[I]n those equations he unified electricity, magnetism and optics all in one setup."

"But then he did something which mathematicians can do... [i.e.,] what-if experiments. You can say... what if these equations have other solutions, and he found... waves with the same speed as light, but a different and than light... and we now call them radio waves. ...Maxwell discovered radio by pure mathematics alone. It was later... that... Hertz found them experimentally, and... later... Marconi and others took the theory and turned it into practical means of communication."

"I'm going to show a picture of a mathematician... that has changed your life profoundly more than anyone I could possibly think of. ...Whilst I'm a great admirer of Washington and Franklin and... all these wonderful people, I reckon this guy's changed your life even more... This is Maxwell, but... most audiences haven't a clue who this is."

"Much of industry has problems which can potentially be formulated and solved using mathematics. ...It's numbers. It's information. It's mathematics."

"But it all started with Maxwell. Let's think where we'd be without radio. We wouldn't have radio... ... TV... ... our s, we wouldn't have microwave cookers. The world would be utterly different without radio! In fact, the modern world simply would not exist without radio waves, and it was Maxwell who discovered them, purely from mathematics, and... very, very few people know who he is. This guy should be on the bank notes... It took us a long time to get his statue up. ...One of the other things he's... noted for is his work in . He essentially invented color photography. He also wrote poetry... He was a... very good guy."

"If there wasn't air around me, I'd die very very quickly... and math is like that for technology. Take the math away, the technology fails, but just like the air around us it's invisible, and lots of people don't know it's there."

"Who was the most famous female mathematician? ...Emmy Noether, [was an] excellent... fantastic mathematician, but if I went into the street, who would know Emmy Noether? ...Even more famous than Marie Curie. Films have been made about this woman. Ada Lovelace... famous, but not as famous as this one. I've seen films, books have been written about her. Hugely famous, most children would know her name. I'm going to put her picture up and it's going to surprise you. ...Florence Nightingale's an incredibly famous woman because... she basically founded modern nursing. ...The story ...she was sent to Crimea and... set up hospitals... which saved huge number of lives, and when she went back to England she developed modern nursing and her practice... are used all over the world, and everyone thinks she's a nurse, but... she was a . She was one of the first members of the and was a really good statistician... [T]he way she cured people wasn't so much through medical care. It's through the... more modern approach, which was to try to work out what was causing people to be ill. ...[S]he gathered loads and loads of data on this and... produced graphs of this data... essentially to convey what she was doing to politicians, because politicians then and sadly now, don't know what numbers are... [S]o she did this through graphical information and she developed... rose diagrams which are very like pie charts... [S]o she not only developed ... she also developed graphical presentation of data, which is universal, and she's incredibly famous, but noone knows she was a mathematician. ...The Royal Statistical Society ...building is called the Nightingale building, after her."

"View #1 about math: Math is completely useless. Another one... Mathematicians are evil, soulless geeks... [A]nother... everyone seems to believe: All mathematicians are mad! ...Unfortunately, they are views quite commonly held."

"[S]ome people are... quite frightened of math, or even... suspicious of math."

"[T]he shame about all of this is not only is it not true. It's really, really, really not true! ...Math is basically the basis of the modern world. The modern world would simply not exist without mathematics."

"On the whole, mathematicians don't have a particularly great image."

"The way maths is used... has... changed enormously, essentially in my own lifetime. ...The whole thing has changed remarkably, largely because of the develoopment of computers."

"The technology that we celebrate today, everything we do, is all heavily based on math. In my pocket I have my ... absolutely stuffed full of mathematics, and lots of mathematicians work in the smart phone industry."

"But nowadays mathematicians are... using maths in a far far broader capacity. One of the biggest users of mathematics, certainly in the U.S., is the ... because if you have something like Shrek... What he is, is a whole load of mathematical formulae inside a computer which some mathematicians come up with... constructed to produce a shape which looks like an , and they've done a great job... So Pixar employs loads of mathematicians... [T]he film industry, a massive user of mathematics!"

"One of my other talks... is about the math in The Lord of the Rings and all the maths that was used for that, because... they used lots of mathematicians there."

"So... [who needs math?] Thirty years ago [traditional industrial users] typically using mathematics... [were] telecommunications, the aircraft industry [aerospace], power generation, oil, iron and steel, weather forecasting... a big user since the 1920s, security-code breaking... and of course, finance."

"I'm going to take you through this, looking at the way history of the way math has impacted our civilization. ...I'll try and take you right up to where we are at the moment, and beyond."

"In July, 2008, was stripped of its license. n officials then granted exploration permits for half of the deposit to a much smaller company: is, by some estimates, the richest man in Israel; according to , his personal fortune amounts to some nine billion dollars. Steinmetz, who made his name in the trade, hardly ever speaks to the press, and the corporate structures of his various enterprises are so convoluted that it is difficult to assess the extent of his holdings. The was a surprising addition to Steinmetz’s portfolio, because B.S.G.R. had no experience exporting . A mining executive in Guinea told me, “Diamonds you can carry away from the mine in your pocket. With iron ore, you need infrastructure that can last decades.”"

"Is there a way to translate the complexity into a narrative that has a kind of hook that will grab people?"

"One chilly morning last week, at a on the edge of , the Roca brothers came in from the cold. They were visiting New York on a twenty-four-hour furlough from , their dining establishment in northeast Spain, which, according to a list issued annually by the ..., is currently the best on the planet. Joan (head chef), Josep (sommelier), and Jordi (desserts) were dressed in dark parkas that did not look quite up to the weather. The plan had been to visit the Greenmarket across the street, but they were hesitating. “It’s cold in Spain this time of year,” Jordi said, nibbling nonjudgmentally on a Pret croissant. “But not like this.”"

"Not long after , authorities in released decades-old documents about the death of her brother. The original police reports—several dozen yellowed pages, some covered in handwritten jottings, some of them typed—contain revelations that call into question the 1987 state-police report that declared the killing an accident."

"Jefferson had served as America's minister to France between 1785 and the outbreak of the French Revolution and had developed a fascination with . Upon his return to America, he continued to order large quantities of for himself and for George Washington and stipulated in one 1790 letter that there respective shipments should be marked with their initials. During his firs term as president, Jefferson spent $7,500—roughly $120,000 in today's currency—on wine, and he is generally regarded as America's first great wine connoisseur. (He might also have been America's first great wine bore. "There was, as usual, a dissertation upon wines," John Quincy Adams noted in his diary after dining with Jefferson in 1807. "Not every edifying.")"

"I vow to strive to apply my professional skills only to projects which, after conscientious examination, I believe to contribute to the goal of coexistence of all human beings in peace, human dignity and self-fulfillment. I believe that this goal requires the provision of an adequate supply of the necessities of life (good food, air, water, clothing and housing, access to natural and man-made beauty), education, and opportunities to enable each person to work out for himself his life objectives and to develop creativeness and skill in the use of hands as well as head. I vow to struggle through my work to minimise danger; noise; strain or invasion of privacy of the individual; pollution of earth, air or water; destruction of natural beauty, mineral resources and wildlife."

"There seems to be one quality of mind which seems to be of special and extreme advantage in leading him to make discoveries. It was the power of never letting exceptions go unnoticed."

"In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs. Not the man who finds a grain of new and precious quality but to him who sows it, reaps it, grinds it and feeds the world on it."

"An adolescent act of defiance has now become a familiar form of virtue. 'Going with the flow' has become an imperative, a clear version of the good life. Change is sentimentally evoked in popular fictions. We 'change' to move on from tragedy or difficulty, we 'change' to overcome trauma, we are frequently told to accept 'change' as some perennial fact of life, the contemplation of which brings wisdom. Virtuous change is the ethic of the soap opera and the ne plus ultra of the advice column."

"For books he had no respect, but merely considered them as tools to be worked with. Thus he did not bind them, and even when a paper book fell to pieces from use, as happened to Müller’s ‘Befruchtung,’ he preserved it from complete dissolution by putting a metal clip over its back. In the same way he would cut a heavy book in half, to make it more convenient to hold. He used to boast that he had made Lyell publish the second edition of one of his books in two volumes, instead of in one, by telling him how ho had been obliged to cut it in half. Pamphlets were often treated even more severely than books, for he would tear out, for the sake of saving room, all the pages except the one that interested him, The consequence of all this was, that his library was not ornamental, but was striking from being so evidently a working collection of books."

"The love of experiment was very strong in him, and I can remember the way he would say, "I shan't be easy till I have tried it," as if an outside force were driving him. He enjoyed experimenting much more than work which only entailed reasoning, and when he was engaged on one of his books which required argument and the marshalling of facts, he felt experimental work to be a rest or holiday."

"Scientists need to be observed and criticized more than any other members of society. I say this not just because of the horrors that might emerge from their laboratories, but also because of the necessity for making them as morally and philosophically answerable as the rest of us."

"Science is not a neutral or innocent commodity which can be employed as a convenience by people wishing to partake only of the West's material power. Rather it is spiritually corrosive, burning away ancient authorities and traditions. It has shown itself unable to co-exist with anything. Scientists inevitably take on the mantle of the wizards, sorcerers and witch-doctors. Their miracle cures are our spells, their experiments our rituals."

"The whole point I am making is that a hard, irreducible sense of our own self-awareness has been progressively denied us by the inroads of science both as a form and as a creator of our society."

"Ignorance may be bliss, but it certainly is not freedom, except in the minds of those who prefer darkness to light, and chains to liberty. The more true information we can acquire, the better for our enfranchisement."

"Remember human nature, Monsignor. After all, it was only intense self-importance that used to make men say that they were independent of exterior beauty. It's far more natural and simple to like beauty. Every child does, after all."

"So long as there is Sin in the world, so long must there be Penance."

"You see, when competition ceases, effort ceases. Human nature is human nature, after all. The Socialists forgot that."

"I agree that your troubles are real enough. But all the better. ... I think that the Authorities are pleased sometimes 'to give us something to cry for.' ... Most of us cry without anything. ... And I think that the insane desire one has sometimes to bang and kick grumblers and peevish persons, is a Divine instinct. ... Ergo. ... Therefore thank Them that you something to cry for. One doesn't get far without it."

"Honors and privileges are worth nothing if every one has them. If we all wore crowns, the kings would go bareheaded."

"It is strange, sometimes, to find that some silent old lady has a power for sounding human character, which far shrewder persons lack."

"The Socialist saw plainly the rights of the Society; the Anarchist saw the rights of the Individual. How therefore were these to be reconciled? The Church stepped in at that crucial point and answered, By the Family — whether domestic or religious. For in the Family you have both claims recognized: there is authority and yet there is liberty. For the union of the Family lies in Love; and Love is the only reconciliation of authority and liberty."

"The State can only give for economic reasons, however conscientious and individually charitable statesmen may be; while the Church gives for the Love of God, and the Love of God never yet destroyed any man's self-respect."

"Since God is approaching man, it is not a degradation, but a triumph of His love, that He should come so far down to meet him."

"The process of digestion in every organism separates the healthy and useful from the harmful and useless elements."

"The real and only satisfactory motive for submission does not lie in superficial things, but in the deep, still current of faith that comes from God direct, and bears the soul along."