BRADY: I noticed one other thing, I noticed
on your board you have a magic square. Correct. BRADY: Why is that there today? You know I spend part of my life doing interviews
and sometimes you have to vary things, you know change a bit from the usual. And so in that interview this was to recall
my initial interest in mathematics. When I was a kid this was the kind of thing
that I loved doing - magic squares. I think it’s one of the oldest mathematic
memories that I have, doing large magic squares. There are techniques for doing the magic squares
when it's an even number but for instance you would do like this. A child can learn how to do this. And I often explain about this in the schools
- it gives you some sense of mystery and power of mathematics and algorithmics. And there you are Brady, see, it's magic. BRADY: So basically this is to entertain journalists? That's correct. But a bit more than that. In this particular case the interview was
intended for children. If I tell the children “you know mathematics
is so good for the GDP because its so good for technology” and so on - not sure they
will like it. But if I tell them when I was a kid, at your
age, I loved to do this kind of figures and it was kind of making me dizzy in a way to see
the properties of the numbers - this was my start - and then it became my job. BRADY: How do you find striking that balance
Sometimes when you're talking to people about mathematics you have to talk about things
like GDP and the important role it plays in society. And other times you just want to show someone
a magic square and just excite them - is that not enough, exciting them? Does it frustrate you that you’re always
having to come up with these justifications for mathematics? You have to justify. Part of the reason is there has been some
excess in the past I guess in insisting on mathematics for itself - mathematics for the
the beauty of it - and somehow we have to insist also on the other side now. But it's okay, you have to balance. Every time I say something about the utility
of mathematics, I will balance it with something about its beauty. And vice versa. BRADY: It’s unusual to hear a mathematician
talk like that, you sound almost half politician. You think that's important? Pure mathematics is not enough these days,
you've got to sing for your supper? In front of you is not just a mathematician,
I'm director of an institute, already six years. For the past four years I have been supporting
a project of expanding my institution and managed to raise 13-14 million Euros for that
project. This can only be achieved if you know how
to talk to society; talking to businessmen, talking to bankers, talking to politicians,
talking to school masters, talking to everybody. If you don't manage to talk the way they understand,
you will not become their friend. BRADY: But when you were younger man doing
some of your work you're most famous for - most awarded for - were you thinking like that
then? Or were you just doing it for the pleasure
and was it just about mathematics then? You know when I chose my subject, Boltzmann
Equation, my adviser wrote for me the Boltzmann Equation, okay one variant of the Boltzmann
Equation, I asked is it useful and who used it? And for me at that time this was an important
question. To know that it was important in the modelling
of rarefied gases, important for construction of shuttles or planes or simulation of what
goes on around the wing of the plane and so on. It was important for me. And later when I worked on it I discovered
I really loved it for the beauty of the study, that the more I was going into it and the
more it was a world opening for me. It was a curiosity that was driving me then. But to get into it I first had to be convinced
of its utility. There's no shame in something being useful. Somehow it's a little bit of poison that Hardy
has instilled in our minds, making us feeling ashamed of what is useful. These were other days, other times and different
context. Now we should not be ashamed of what is useful
and even understand that when it is useful it is even more beautiful. There has to be some useful and some useless. Sometimes the useful becomes useless, sometimes
the useless will become useful. There has to be room for all kinds of mathematicians
and it's a big illusion to think that there is a real recipe to decide what has to be
funded and what should not. You know you have to allow some uncertainty
in the system. If you try to predict, you lose the most interesting
parts. BRADY: Do you think mathematicians are good
at outreach? Do you think mathematicians are good at explaining
themselves? In general mathematicians are not so good
at outreach. And there are reasons for that. Some reasons are related to the field itself;
because we go into such details. You know even between ourselves mathematicians
it is difficult to communicate. It's so hard to communicate between mathematicians
of different specialties. To talk to the oouter public, the outer audience,
is an even greater challenge. You have really get to the point, understand
what you want to share and so on. Another reason is when you are into mathematics
you have been so high on the scale of complexity of reasoning that you are living in some kind
of altered reality. You think that everybody on the street is
able to understand complicated reasoning and so on. And you get very frustrated when you discover
that's not the case. And then there's a third reason, I guess. Which has to do with, how do you say, the
business model of mathematics so to speak. The physicists, the chemists, the biologists
- they are often in contact with the industry. Or the people who run big teams, they have
to negotiate budgets, fundings, with the big pharmacy companies, or with the big sponsors,
otherwise they don't have enough funding for the experiments and so on. And so they their learn to --- their rhetoric
and speech and so on. It struck me when I first attended the conferences
of Nobel Prizes how good were some of the people, Nobel Laureates, in physics and biology,
to present themselves. And I attributed that to the fact that they
had to do it already many times for the funding in their career to people who were really
out of their world, and it was very important to convince those people to trust them. BRADY: And historically mathematicians don't
need as much funding? Historically we don't need the companies,
historically no such need for support. I need the companies now because I am working
on this outreach interface. We are soon opening some kind of museum of
mathematics - soon means in three years or something. This will be impossible without the contribution
of the industry, the economic world, so I had to learn to talk to them otherwise my
projects could not have come into life.
Thanks for sharing. Though the whole utility/beauty dichotomy is so tired (and a false one, at that), he had some real insights in that video:
I couldn't agree more. I think there is a huge culture problem among mathematicians in this regard. I have certainly encountered people who look down on the "applied side" of things, even if they don't willingly admit it.
It also is so important to hear criticisms from the top that we do not do our a sufficient job at connecting with the public, or even other mathematicians. It's often chalked up to things like "my research is inaccessible to a general audience." But we need to take some of the blame ourselves.
I'm a high school senior and an aspiring mathematician. I love both applied practical mathematics and pure mathematics; but the one thing that saps my passion for math is finance. I despise financial math. It just feels... artificial. Is this commonplace or am I being irrational?
I will always upvote Cedric Villani
Is there really a culture problem with mathematicians poopooing on applied mathematics? I bet they change their song when they see our funding.