Numbers and the world: Essays on Math and Beyond

This book is a collection of essays written by a distinguished mathematician with a very long and successful career as a researcher and educator working in many areas of pure and applied mathematics. The author writes about everything he found exciting about math, its history, and its connections with art, and about how to explain it when so many smart people (and children) are turned off by it. The three longest essays touch upon the foundations of mathematics, upon quantum mechanics and Schrödinger's cat phenomena, and upon whether robots will ever have consciousness. Each of these essays includes some unpublished material. The author also touches upon his involvement with and feelings about issues in the larger world. The author's main goal when preparing the book was to convey how much he loves math and its sister fields. Opening more eyes to mathematics How to get middle school students to love formulas & triangles Explaining Grothendieck to non-mathematicians Are mathematical formulas beautiful? The history of mathematics Pythagoras’s rule The checkered history of algebra Multi-culutural math history in five slides “Modern” art/“modern” math and the Zeitgeist Interlude: Intelligent design in Orion? AI, neuroscience, and consciousness Parse trees are ubiquitous in thinking Linking deep learning and cortical functions Does/can human consciousness exist in animals and robots? And now, some bits of real math Finding the rhythms of the primes Spaces of shapes and rogue waves An applied mathematician’s foundations of math Coming to terms with the quantum Quantum theory and the mysterious collapse Path integrals and quantum computing Nothing is simple in the real world Wake up! One world or many? Spinoza: Euclid, ethics, time Thoughts on the future