Colm O'Regan: The great stories I want to hear in maths class — like the Roy Keane of Indian mathematicians
If you’re ever thinking, I’m actually a legend, the problem is no one else knows, then your hero should be Srinivasa Ramanujan, the Roy Keane of Indian mathematicians.
There’s a 21st birthday this week although it probably won’t get too messy. It’s the 21st Maths Week. And on my last Friday — this column is moving to Saturday soon — I’ve given ye homework off and telling stories.
About maths. Yes! There are great stories there that don’t get mentioned in double maths after lunch with the radiators up full blast and the sun already setting.
Do you ever have a thought and think, 'I must write that down or I’ll forget'? You might send yourself a text.
What if it’s October 16, 1843, and you are mathematician William Rowan Hamilton out for a walk near the canal at Broombridge in Dublin, and the thought is trying to figure out how to multiply in three dimensions and you’ve no pen.
Then, of course, the obvious thing is to scratch the answer in graffiti on a bridge to come back to it. If he did it now, the neighbourhood WhatsApp would be buzzing about a man acting strangely and someone would call the guards and the guards would say they’ll send a car and then they don’t. But that scrawl is used now 180 years later for drone technology.
As you all know, the only reason you’re in school is to get to ‘The College’ so you can go to a lecture in the Boole Basement in UCC. George Boole basically invented the philosophy that runs all computers — that everything in logic is either yes or no, true or false, one or zero. It’s essential in computers and, of course, terrible in the rest of life, where most things are maybe / sort of / I suppose / but on the other hand.
His wife, Mary Everest, raised in a medical cult by the father of homeopathy who believed every disease could be cured by the disease itself, or 'like cures like', was a mathematician in her own right. She helped him publish his work but also unfortunately, when he was in bed from the chill that would kill him, she thought pouring buckets of cold water over him was the best way to cure him.
Unfortunately, like did not cure like, like. I’ve added the extra like for the Cork angle.
Have found people don’t listen to your brilliant ideas because they are distracted by your luminous star quality, beauty and killer bod?
I certainly have, which is why I sympathise with Hedy Lamarr, the Austrian film star who eavesdropped on her fascist arm-dealer husband’s conversation about radio-controlled missiles, learned loads, fled the imminent Nazis, became a Hollywood star, filed a patent for ‘frequency hopping’, was ignored and told to use her face to sell war-bonds, sold $7m-worth of them, but the technology she patented is used in wi-fi.
If you’re ever thinking, I’m actually a legend, the problem is no one else knows, then your hero should be Srinivasa Ramanujan, the Roy Keane of Indian mathematicians. Not because of his combative midfield style. But his method of getting discovered.
Roy Keane famously wrote to 92 English League clubs with his credentials. Ramanujan wrote to many mathematicians around the world with his discoveries, and only one replied or showed any interest.
Ramanujan’s Nottingham Forest was GW Hardy, who eventually got him to Cambridge and got him more worldwide fame. He was so genius-y, the stuff he worked on appeared to not have much use at the time, but is now used in everything from cryptography to black holes.
Kind of like how Roy Keane’s combative midfield style has made him really good at podcasting. You never know when your talents will be in demand again.
If you can see yourself in any of these scenarios, or even if you can’t and just like good stories, Maths Week, 21 today, could be the week for you.
