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In Romance with Mathematics ...

Note: This is another of the old articles of mine. I wrote this one on 20th June 2003, during my engineering.

As a student of engineering my romance with mathematics has been a bit long, and believe me I have enjoyed every moment of it. At times when you obtain the result of a mathematical equation and find it with complete convergence with the actual physical situation, it is time to sit back and enjoy the beauty of MATHEMATICS.

The elegance of mathematics lies in its ability to transform abstract physical phenomena into mathematical equations. It is these equations which allow us to manipulate the unmanipulatable situations to fit certain conditions, requirements and finally to obtain desired results which are interpreted as Science.

Looks around a house-You probably find a TV, a radio and a telephone. None of these instruments would have been without what we call ‘communication satellites’. These gadgets would never have been but for Mathematics.

Man had known for ages that a stone thrown upwards falls down, but this abstract phenomenon had no practical application except rolling stones downhill. When Newton gave his theory of Universal Gravitation this phenomenon was accounted for. But still it had no practical application. At this stage Mathematics came to the aid of science so that Newton’s laws were expressed as a mathematical equation-

F= G m1.m2

And it was immediately after this equation was manipulated did it yield a result that, it was possible to throw stones such that they never returned back but revolved round the earth. This was the concept of satellites. Could we have inferred it without Mathematics?
It was just because of Mathematics that Einstein could ever arrive at the magical relation of mass energy equivalence-
E=mc²
And what good does this dumb relation do to us? You would ask! Well, it is this relation that predicts that there ‘is’ Atomic Energy, our answer to the energy crisis. In fact this relation is against common sense, so that no great logician, no great thinker, not even Einstein could have predicted it till Mathematics showed that this impossibility was indeed possible.
Mathematics dies not just predict seemingly impossible events but even general events such as the speed at which you should drive to reach your office in time.

Many people dislike and some hate mathematics- mostly those qualified in fields of Arts and Commerce. ‘Creativity ends where Mathematics begins’ is their argument. Let me twist the sentence a little ‘Mathematics begins where Creativity ends’. Try to read between the lines and you get the massage. Mathematics is not a killer of creativity; rather it is its offspring. You cannot have Mathematics without being creative. To solve even the simplest of equations you need creativity. It is after deployment of creativity that Mathematics actually begins.
Beautiful buildings, bridges, structures could never have been possible had the architects who designed them not deployed creativity and (I continue to say in the same breath) the civil engineers not deployed Mathematics to determine their structural stability.
All beautiful shapes, colors that you see around you are mostly a product of machines, which could never have been built without mathematics. Mathematics is beautiful! It is just a question of looking towards it from the right angle. All artists can bring finery into their work if they learn to deploy Mathematics in the correct way.

You must have seen beautiful graphics on the TV and hailed them as the fantastic creations of artists. They are the best examples of how Mathematics can be deployed to create Art. No Computer graphics can be created unless the programmer analyses, and feeds into the computer, each shape as a mathematical equation. In fact each of these shapes can be frequently found in Mathematics textbooks in chapters on Geometry. Mathematics indeed is beautiful !

From the day when man counted the fingers on his hand to this day when he builds space stations, super computers, robots, rockets and what not, Mathematics has survived and coexisted with man. There is no better index of stage of development and civilization during a particular period of time than the state of mathematics during it.
Perhaps the ability of a nation’s man to work on Mathematics determines its ability to progress. As the Late Dewang Mehta (the then President –NASSCOM) pointed out once on national television-“ The reason why India leads the IT bandwagon is, more than our knowledge of English, the fact that we have Mathematics in our genes, and IT is all about mathematics.”
Hope this post goads your interest in Mathematics. Hope you too can enjoy the happiness of being ‘In Romance with Mathematics’. Amen!

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