Nothing in this world is more important than beauty, any science no matter how useful will always be judged on its beauty. Something ugly no matter how useful is uninspiring for instance Columbus’s discovery of America is not a beautiful thing but a simple tune from a blind beggar maybe so .Beauty may be anything a girl, an idea , a dream,a vision ,an inspiration something that is amazing ,raw in it’s creativity that makes the creator feel incredible, unstoppable like sunny Deol in the last scene of Border! That feeling is the greatest addiction on earth and is what drives a creator to create, try if u can to imagine how Isaac Newton felt when he saw an apple fall and then saw everything! If you see a Van Gough painting you will see technique and skill in which he brings to life the curvatures and brightness of a scene, but I bet any arts student will easily be able to master those techniques. Technique in art is what knowledge is in science, beauty requires something more than knowledge, the beauty of a Van Gough painting is in that glow of a lantern in a dark room just by looking at which u can feel the heat of it’s surface or that feeling of a calm European village beneath a clear starry night or the loneliness of a prisoner in a dark dreary dungeon, there is something Van Gough does that makes his paintings alive ,and that no trick or technique can teach.
Mathematics is called the queen of sciences, truly if man were a chess player and the different disciplines of sciences were his pieces mathematics would be the queen. Well for one the queen is a symbol of beauty and perfection like Helen was to the Greeks , also the queen is a one of a kind unique and quite powerful but beyond all this when as a boy I used to play chess the most interesting thing was how it’s loss would thoroughly demoralize me, often I used to loose sight of the whole game and obsess solely on protecting the queen. It is this kind of dangerous obsession that one associates with mathematics. A mathematical proof is an extremely creative exercise and often a very frustrating one yet that feeling one gets when through an idea , a simple idea borne from curiosity ,imagination and reasoning one can create something perfectly beautiful is worth it all. Many people often talk about something called god complex, god is and is only a creator, a creator of among many things beauty and I see nothing wrong or arrogant of any other creator of something beautiful to fancy himself as god.
Today as I sit in a lecture of solid state chemistry by people of tifr who are quite knowledgeable about the subject I just feel it’s all ugly. The questions these researchers ask ( which is the curiosity the main driving force of any science) are not very unobvious as in they do not require amazing vision, and then they conduct experiments to decide these questions. I am not saying it does not take intelligence to conduct these experiments nor can I deny that these works benefit mankind hugely but these are more like mundane results of hard work and diligence rather than glorious fruits of human intellect. Erdos himself talked about certain mathematical proofs which he thought were so artistic that they were fit to be included in god’s own book , later a most remarkable book titled ‘ Proofs From The Book’ was written regarding these. An intelligent person need not be creative(However I believe all creative people are intelligent based on which I once argued to Anish Nag that Van Gough would have been an excellent mathematician)I guess you could say an intelligent person as the cliché goes in management these days sees the bigger picture while a dreamer(as john Lenon called them) sees a different picture. And now as this endless stream of power point presentation laden with sheet after sheet of meticulously organized experimental data comes to an end , I feel glad that outside in the world beauty still lives and in my heart I raise a toast to the creations and creators of all things beautiful mathematical or otherwise.
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