Like a starburst

Imagine you are twenty and have been challenged to a duel. You’ve never been in a fight before, leave alone firing a pistol. You have o...

Imagine you are twenty and have been challenged to a duel. You’ve never been in a fight before, leave alone firing a pistol. You have one night to live, and an entire world inside your head that you need to share.

Such was the fate of Galois, one of the greatest French mathematicians of all times. Misunderstood and unrecognised throughout his brief life, he spent the last night of his life scribbling down all his work hastily, in order to leave something behind to people who were unable to understand him in his lifetime. He stopped occasionally and scribbled ‘‘I have not time, I have not time’’ in the margin. The sixty pages that he filled up that night have kept mathematicians all over the world occupied for hundreds of years.

But he wasn’t the only one. Some of the most brilliant mathematicians seem to have been fated with short lives. For instance, Ramanujan, Blaise Pascal, Abel and Ramsey all died before they reached 40. Was this only coincidence, or was it that they came too close to discovering the truth? Many brilliant musicians too have lived short lives. But they had the comfort of oblivion provided by the fame and drugs denied to the mathematicians.

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People often compare the study of pure mathematics to poetry, to philosophy, and to the pursuit of truth. There is a popularly held belief that the world of mathematics exists as a separate, independent entity that was not created by the human mind and that some of us have just been fortunate to get a glimpse of it. Sadly, the subject ‘maths’ that we are taught at high school does not provide any indicator of what pure mathematics is like, much the same way as our student life is not suggestive of our lives at work. A fabulous book Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, discusses the interplay between the music of Bach, the artwork of Escher and the mathematics and philosophy of Godel.

Life stories of mathematicians inspire and encourage. Even those who lived long lives had achieved greatness at an extremely young age. By the ages of 22 and 24, Newton and Gauss had created some of their greatest works.

For me, it was always this timer ticking at the back of my head. Then I reached a certain age and realised that I would forever be condemned to mediocrity in this world that I loved and cherished so.