• a_g_marut@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    19 days ago

    Transcript for screenreader users:

    THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

    BY DR. TERENCE TAO AND ZACH WEINERSMITH

    Dr. Tao: When I tell people at parties that I’m a mathematician, there’s often an awkward pause in the conversation, or the obligatory…

    Steve: Oh, I was SOOOOO bad at math at school!

    Though occasionally you run into a math and science enthusiast who wants to discuss a recent development they heard in the news…

    Enthusiast: Oh my gosh, my friends and I CANNOT stop talking about reconstructing cryptographic protocols from quantum principles, and… do you want to move this conversation to a whiteboard?

    [Tao smiles and sheds a tear.]

    …or someone who actually had a good experience in their math classes and was somewhat wistful about not pursuing it.

    Old man: I’ll always think of Hadwiger’s graph theory conjecture as… the one that got away.

    Tao: Those are good moments. But, in general, the public have very little idea what mathematics is, and what mathematicians actually do. Popular culture gives us some caricature portrayals of mathematicians:

    The tortured genius…

    Tortured genius: I cannot know love, but by god I WILL know if every polyomino with an area divisible by six can tile a hexagon!

    (torturedness rates among mathematicians are, in fact average)

    The savant with strange mental powers…

    [savant seeing equations floating before his eyes]

    (if you see equations floating before your eyes, please consult an ophthalmologist)

    The eccentric professor…

    Professor on unicycle blowing fire out of a trombone: I work in information theory, unicycles, and flaming trombones.

    (only true of Claude Shannon)

    From math class, you might’ve gotten the impression we’re some sort of sorcerers, casting spells full of strange symbols and jargon to defeat abstract enemies from another plane of existence.

    Sorcerer: By the power of Fourier, I banish you from function space to frequency space! [sorcerer wearing a robe wielding a staff glowing at the end, addressing a surface plot of the Riemann zeta function]

    Part 1 of 5!

    Press forward to continue! [an orange bouncing to the left]

    Bonus panel: [Zach Weinersmith behind the drawing board, holding up his left hand, which has become gnarled and has wavy lines rising from his fingers, due to the amount of effort it took to draw this five-part comic. His family is standing behind him. His younger kid is smiling. His older kid’s shirt reads “Ponies etc.”]