What's so sexy about math? | Cédric Villani
Hidden truths permeate our world; they're inaccessible to our senses, but math allows us to go beyond our intuition to uncover their mysteries. In this survey of ...
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What is it that French people do better than all the others? If you would take polls, the top three answers might be: love, wine and whining. (Laughter) Maybe. But let me suggest a fourth one: mathematics. Did you know that Paris has more mathematicians than any other city in the world? And more streets with mathematicians' names, too. And if you look at the statistics of the Fields Medal, often called the Nobel Prize for mathematics, and always awarded to mathematicians below the age of 40, you will find that France has more Fields medalists per inhabitant than any other country. What is it that we find so sexy in math? After all, it seems to be dull and abstract, just numbers and computations and rules to apply. Mathematics may be abstract, but it's not dull and ...
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What is it that French people do better than all the others? If you would take polls, the top three answers might be: love, wine and whining. (Laughter) Maybe. But let me suggest a fourth one: mathematics. Did you know that Paris has more mathematicians than any other city in the world? And more streets with mathematicians' names, too. And if you look at the statistics of the Fields Medal, often called the Nobel Prize for mathematics, and always awarded to mathematicians below the age of 40, you will find that France has more Fields medalists per inhabitant than any other country. What is it that we find so sexy in math? After all, it seems to be dull and abstract, just numbers and computations and rules to apply. Mathematics may be abstract, but it's not dull and ...
