Going as per wikipedia, Mathematics is the study of quantity, structure, space, and change. They say that Mathematicians seek out patterns, formulate new conjectures, and establish truth by rigorous deduction from appropriately chosen axioms and definitions. Quite complicated, right? In my opinion there is no definition to it. Its you who can decide what Mathematics is for you.
Here is what true Mathematicians think of Mathematics, it is something that they can sense and it proves to be a life-supporting element for them. Mathematics is something that they can see, smell, taste, hear and touch. In brief, they can sense Mathematics. Mathematics is not limited to numbers or ratios or percentages or calculus. There is no end to it. Mathematics, if was to be measured, its length would be equal to a number line, and a number line has no ends, and so is Mathematics i.e. it has no ends. It is so vast that even great Mathematicians devoted all their life into it and still they could not explore it end to end.
Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics. ~Dean Schlicter
We come across Mathematics in almost every facet of life, without even having a slightest clue about it in most of the cases. It all depends on your perception. In the morning when you wake up with your alarm clock ringing, its all Mathematics which governs the GMT and assigns a time to every country on our globe. The interest earned on a bank account, the arrangement of seeds in a sunflower, and the shape of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis are all intimately connected with the mysterious numbers which are a gift of Mathematics. Even black holes result from God on dividing the universe by zero. You pick any incident or any rule, I bet each of them is governed by Mathematics.
Mathematics can be as mysterious as "finding highest prime number" i.e pow(2,43112609)-1 and as simple as counting natural numbers. What will you call what Aryabhatta gave to Mathematics, "0". Was it a discovery or an invention? Discovery, because 0 always existed, there were NULL things even before Aryabhatta proposed 0. Invention, because he suggested the symbol "0" for "Null".
I developed an interest in Mathematics at a very young age. I being a student of a boarding school, went on to become a lazy guy. I never developed interest in other subjects but always did good in Mathematics. I used to score somewhere around 60% when I was doing my primary classes, but always got highest marks in Mathematics, that what probably the reason that helped me pick my area and do better in it. I developed interest in numbers, because I was very much into solving puzzles and riddles. "Puzzles to puzzle you" by Shankuntala Devi is one of my favorite book.
Indians have always been considered the people gifted with the best of minds, and thats the reason why brain drain is so common in our country. Every other good college can be seen catering students with sky-soaring salaries. For example, this year 5 people have got placements of above 1 crore at IIMC, but all in foreign firms. So, my explanation to this is, probably our education system is one of the prime reason for attracting foreign firms to hire Indian minds. The level of Mathematics in our schools in more than enough to train our young guns and help them do better than their foreign colleagues when it comes to performance in corporate world. Something saddening is that, there have been attempts by some fools to scrap this interesting subject from the curriculum and devoid people of the excitement that they can experience and can go through. Even making Mathematics an optional subject will not do, in my opinion. One can not think of the seriousness and the intensity of the problem that a person can fall into if he/she is weak at calculations. After all, you do not have an access to a calculator everywhere.
Fasten your safety belts for the global economy. Unfortunately this brave new world poses a serious and formidable challenge to the India. The problem is that our young guns are just not showing much interest or skills in the areas of math, engineering, science, or technology. As the workers of the baby boomer generation start to retire, we not only need to fill these jobs, but instruct our young people to compete for the global jobs of the future. So we should stick to the success mantra that we have been following for years and be proud of it. Let the Indian wagon of success speed up by making Mathematics more application based rather than plain, boring and formulae based.
2 comments:
if there was ever a article about passion of mathematics ,surely this would rate first class.
thank you Rohan.
And you are welcome to the bloggin world. I am waiting for you to publish your first blog post. Hope it comes soon
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