Beauty is Math, and Math Beauty

You probably wouldn’t find Professor of Mathematics Barry C. Mazur’s paper on the computation of p-adic heights and log convergence at, say, the Barker Center. But if he were to get his way, Mazur wouldn’t mind if English concentrators could at least understand the first few pages.

The Gade University Prof explains that if you ask mathematicians to “talk about a 10-D space and visualize it,” it wouldn’t be a problem. But in “Imagining Numbers,” his 2002 book, he hopes to explain such mind-bogglers to scholars outside the TI-83 set.

Mazur’s book, with the parenthetical subtitle “Particularly the Square Root of Minus Fifteen,” started as a letter explaining imaginary numbers to Michel Chaouli, a professor of German and comparative literature at Indiana University. Chaouli praised Mazur extensively in an e-mail, calling him “the most remarkable thinker I have ever met.”

Professor of Mathematics Noam D. Elkies, who teaches Quantitative Reasoning 28, “The Magic of Numbers,” with Mazur, has seen his colleague’s teaching ability first hand. Elkies says that it is Mazur’s “wide and sympathetic erudition” that makes him “particularly good at” reaching students outside of math-heavy fields.

So get ready, Barker Center groupies. P-adic number systems are coming soon.