Isn’t it amazing?

*movie review: Story of Maths: To infinity and Beyond

I can say this maybe the heaviest part of the series in which modern math can relate most. Math is about unlocking mysteries, problems that makes it really alive, kicking and turns some mathematicians’ minds cracked.

                It is the unsolved problems which make today’s math. If all those concepts were solved then it would be already boring. It has this cycle of knowing the problem, understanding it and solves it, then finds another problem, understand and solve and the cycle goes on. This last series of Story of Maths dealt with the mathematicians behind the success of digging into the idea of infinity and other great mathematical issues especially Hilbert’s 23 problems. 

Georg Cantor cracked the idea of infinity. No one had understood it before him. He’s really one of a kind. He’s after the idea of smaller infinities from bigger ones and there different kinds of infinity. Truly amazing.  Next was Henri Poincare, a brilliant man in algebra, geometry and analysis which lead to any sort of applications, predicting the weather for instance, also, he’s behind of the chaos theory This man has organized schedules of his work time. I must say, he has an admiring attitude. Leonhard Euler engaged in the problem of topology. Also, Poincare worked with topology but encountered some problems `and was stuck to what we call the Poincare conjecture. Then he was saved by this man Grisha Perelman who figured this out. But the approach of Perelman is very difficult to understand even by the mathematicians.

                Hilbert’s ideas were dealt, Hilbert space, classification, inequality, and other theorems. He’s upto creating a new style of mathematics, an abstract approach. He stand that mathematics is a universal language. He’s certain that there are no unsolvable problems, and in time, his 23 problems will be solved and has this notion, “We must know, we will know”.  Kurt Gödel, the Mr. Why destroyed Hilbert’s belief. He has this Incompleteness Theorem, states that within the logical system of mathematics, there will be statements about numbers which are true but can never be proved.

I was astonished by the story of the great and brave mathematician, Paul Cohen.  He was so confident in his discoveries, for instance, Hilbert’s first problem. Marcus looks at his surprising discoveries. For Cohen, there were varying sorts of mathematics in which contradicting answers to the same question were probable. He also looked at the work of André Weil and his colleagues, who amplify algebraic geometry, which assisted in solving many of mathematics' most challenging equations, say Fermat’s Last Theorem.

I was hopeless all the time that there would be no female mathematician to be cited in this series. Thank God, there are! Sofia Kovalevskaya proved that math isn’t just for male. Emmy Noether, was also one but she died before she shines. Next is Julia Robinson, the first woman to be elected as president by the American Mathematical Society. Grown as a sickly child but has a great passion for math and dreamed to be one of the mathematicians. She endured Hilbert’s 10^th problem and wouldn’t want to disappear in this world without cracking it and developed the Robinson Hypothesis. Alexander Grothendieck was cited for his ideas which great impact on modern mathematical approach on hidden structures behind all mathematics.

Riemann Hypothesis remained to be the greatest unsolved problem, some have said there’s no way it could be solved, and few disagree. Mathematics is about looking for answers, proving problems and get rid of any doubt.  We have now the mathematical glasses which able us to delve into the problematic but remarkable world of mathematics.

The further intangible and complex mathematics turn into, the more it appears to have applications and purpose in the real world. It permeates each aspect of our lives, consciously or not.

It is the grandeur of solving problems that stimulate every mathematician that outsmart other mathematicians and not by earnings, prizes and any material gain or even by practical applications of their discoveries. We discovered a lot but still there are still undiscovered, many things we do not understand. No matter how many those unsolved problems, it makes math continuously breathing which urge every new generation of mathematicians.

To endure these mysteries of math, I must say Hilbert’s line, "We must know, we will know".