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The maths trail

John Nash

Rome: John Nash, the 79-year-old, Nobel prize-winning mathematician who fought schizophrenia and inspired a Hollywood biopic, can now take credit for doing something really hard: making Italians like mathematics.

He is back here for the second edition of a maths festival that drew 60,000 visitors last year and isfuelling a maths boom in Italy that has seen university applications double in two years.

At the four-day event which ends on Sunday, the man who heard imaginary voices for years and was played by Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind, heads a line-up including five Nobel winners as well as writers and musicians all seeking to explain in a lively way why art, business and music exist thanks to numbers.

“The idea... is to present it in a more interesting way without dumbing things down,” said Piergiorgio Odifreddi, Italian mathematician and festival director.

Fellow mathematician Alfio Quarteroni will explain the mathematical secrets behind last year’s America’s Cup-winning yacht; economist Amartya Sen is discussing the equations that govern famine; Thomas Banchoff, a friend of Salvador Dali, is outlining the fourth dimension in the artist’s work. World record juggler Allen Knutson is revealing the computer programs he wrote to help keep more balls in the air.

“I haven’t met this juggler yet, and I’m really curious,” said Nash, over the shouts of schoolchildren lining up to enter the festival site to check out exhibits featuring tennis balls and soapy water bubbles, as well as complex games using pieces of pasta as counters that Nash admitted he had not fathomed.

After a huge screen needed to be erected outside the lecture halls last year to handle the overflow, this year young volunteers were wowing visitors outside the halls with scientific tricks.

Sitting in a bar outside the festival signing autographs, Nash said his introduction to science was more mundane.

“I grew up with a basic chemistry set and a delightful model steam engine and I recall being impressed by my father’s slide rule, which was made from wood and ivory and came in a leather case.”

American physics Nobel winner Sheldon Glashow said he owed his success to shooting pool when he was meant to be studying at university. “I will get on to talking about elementary particles at the festival but I also want to discuss how the mathematical implications of pool shots got me into physics.”

Mathematician Stephen Smale admitted the maths bug bit late. “I failed a physics course in college and only switched to maths in the last year before nearly being kicked out of grad school. Back then in the 1950s I was into politics and a communist party member,” said Mr. Smale, who will discuss his work on the mathematical modelling of the human visual cortex with a view to improving eye sight in robots.

Opening the proceedings on Thursday, the writer Umberto Eco warned that numbers could do a lot, but could not explain everything. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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