The Consolation of Math in Plague Time
In reflecting about what I might do for the community, for my students, my family, myself, during these pandemic times, I found myself wrestling with preliminary thoughts, working them up into some notes that eventually took the form of an article. When I
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In reflecting about what I might do for the community, for my students, my family, myself, during these pandemic times, I found myself wrestling with preliminary thoughts, working them up into some notes that eventually took the form of an article.1 When I submitted it to the Mathematical Intelligencer, it was suggested that I also submit an excerpt of it, or a short similar essay, to this volume. I’m very happy to do this! I’m a mathematician devoted to rather theoretical issues. If I were an applied mathematician I am sure that I’d be delighted to be pressed into service: collecting, sorting, and classifying data. And formulating and calibrating models that help in interpreting what the data wants to tell us about what has happened in the past and what we can expect for the future. But how can pure mathematicians be of help? Besides, of course, teaching Multivariable Calculus and Probability Theory to the future generation of epidemiologists and practitioners, and just homeschooling children or grandchildren and keeping contact with students; usually necessarily Zoom contact. Well, we can just try to be avid students of the work of our applied colleagues— close listeners, and appreciaters. In a broader arena, we can look out for what we can do for the good of others. . . . but also: we could be looking in, for some mode of consolation. As for “looking out,” our government, our communities, our common humanity, our families—all need the closest of attention—and there is even welcome energy now—now— for the righting of long-lingering wrongs. The world faces a palimpsest of hundreds of thousands of personal misfortunes, tragedies some surely are; but
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Math in the Time of Plague.
B. Mazur (*) Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Wonders (ed.) Math in the Time of Corona, Mathematics Online First Collections, https://doi.org/10.1007/16618_2020_8
B. Mazur
we also see the emergence, perhaps, of vibrant energy2. to meet challenges, and effect some kind of long-range change. As for “looking in,” we have those gems of constancy: mathematical thought, and mathematics per se to understand and appreciate. Mathematics seems to be blessed with eternal youth—the freshness of new conjectures, methods, results, overviews, analogies—and, most curiously, the freshness of the old ones too! Every advance seems to offer us a higher perch, from which we see more, and then have more new questions to excite our imagination. And yet the old questions never lose their allure. A mathematician friend of mine once said that every time he thinks about the Pythagorean Theorem he is enchanted anew. And mathematical ideas don’t necessarily decrescendo during adverse times. In one of those—from today’s perspective, ridiculously minor—personal bad times, I managed to prove some (equally minor) lemma. Made happy by realizing that I actually could work in such times, I cheerily called my lemma my consolation prize. Happily, in good tim
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