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Manu Joseph became a journalist because he didn’t have to crack any objective-type entrance exam to be one. His first novel, Serious Men, is the winner of The Hindu Best Fiction Award. It is one of Huffington Post’s 10 Best Books of 2010, and was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2010. He is the editor of Open. EMAIL AUTHOR |
The aspiration of maths is to be philosophy. It is a more innocent ambition than the aspiration of philosophy to be government. Over the years, maths has tried to explain how everything began. Why an object falls. Why length, breadth and height are merely a human imagination of space. Why competing vegetable hawkers tend to flock together instead of standing far apart. A significant moment in the evolution of language was actually a moment in the history of mathematics, when Isaac Newton discovered a new way of saying something. Through the equation. Sometimes known as the formula.
In recent years, an increasing number of bright people have used the formula to predict human behaviour, and the patterns of our general financial emotions. Wall Street saw in these formulae a magical way of making money from money. That’s when things became messy or comical, depending on how much grouse you have. The collapse of investment banking is blamed on mathematical models like David X Li’s Gaussian copula function which appeared to prove on a piece of paper that there is a considerable emotional distance between different sets of people who are influenced by different types of loans, and so all of them will not behave the same way, like say default en masse. Earlier, in the 90s, the Black-Scholes options pricing model inspired the creation of a hedge fund called Long Term Capital Management, which earned billions of dollars before suddenly collapsing. These mathematical models claimed to have found accurate ways of understanding risk, and they turned out to be fundamentally flawed. The failure of contemporary maths in explaining people or predicting the impact of man-made events is part of a larger crisis that the field is going through today. In fact, increasingly, there seems to be something naive about the aspirations of maths. There is something naive about maths trying to explain human nature by creating models that work only if people are presumed to be rational. And there is something naive about maths trying to understand the universe through eleven dimensions (or has it increased to twelve?) because it did not get anywhere with four.
At the heart of respect, usually, is incomprehension. If urchins only fully knew what most of us actually did for a living they will not be in so much awe of us. They may, in fact, start laughing. In a way, our view of mathematicians is from an urchin’s point of view. We do not fully comprehend their language and so we grant them an easy halo. Anyone can spit on a writer, because everybody can judge his work. The very purpose of a writer is to be comprehensible to all (some Indian writers of what is called literary fiction will chuckle in secret disagreement). But, to question maths you must have uncommon knowledge. So mathematicians do get away with a lot. That’s why we have delightful rubbish like wormholes, and warp speed and time reversal. Fortunately, mathematicians have generally ill-tempered peers and it is through their venom that we now know that Wall Street’s favourite risk assessment models were ‘moronic’. And why, Stephen Hawking, after claiming that time can be reversed, apologised for making such a statement. Your grandmother, too, may have said, ‘rubbish,’ but that did not count. Hawking’s peers had to say it.
Maths is complex even to mathematicians. In its ambition to resolve the mysteries of the universe, it is now stranded in even more mysteries, some of which, scientists accuse, are its own creations. For instance, one sect of scientists now say that over 95 per cent of the universe is made up of things called dark matter and dark energy. Nobody knows what these things are (hence, dark) but equations predict them. Without them, modern physics does not make any sense. There are scientists who say that maybe these dark things do not exist. They are just products of maths. There was a time when something called the String Theory held a lot of promise in understanding the universe. But after over two decades of being in fashion, and proclaiming that there are trillions of universes, a reason why our universe must be spelt with a small ‘u’, the theory is slowly losing its charm.
True, the age of maths is only a fraction of the age of gods and godmen. Probably, one day it will answer all our questions, even the ultimate question—why is there something instead of nothing?
OLDER COMMENTS FIRST
7 COMMENTS
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I started to read this article after being encouraged by the piece you wrote on Delhi (I am from Delhi) just to see what kind of opinion you hold over other things, living and dead.
You have picked up mathematics too, to mudsling here. And your article reeks of lack of comprehension and the inability to distinguish between what is physics and mathematics. A field that is marked by such geniuses like Newton, Cauchy, Laplace, Abel, De Moivre, Drichilet, Gauss...who made contributions to EVERY known field of art & science (most were better writers than you, to sya the least).....is casually treated by a person who has a marble in place of a brain.
Too bad your editors aren't reading the unresearched articles that you are throwing left right and center.
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I couldn't but suppress a smirk after going through your rant and thought I would give you some food for thought with respect to mathematics.
1st paragraph: Aspiration of philosophy is to reach a point where expressed truth takes a mathematical form and is absolute. Like Bertrand Russel said "Mathematics is the only place where truth and beauty coexist". Also, vegetable hawkers tending to flock together is a more statistics based problem than pure mathematics, but you won't probably understand the difference between the two.
2nd paragraph: The science of predicting behavior or pattern by means of mathematics is what is termed as simulation and is the reason behind everything from aerial flight to satellite launches. The stage when this predictive technique is applied to more random and probabilistic data like derivative prices, stocks etc is when we use the branch of mathematics that deals with modeling such random walks and is a very respected branch of calculus, and not the easiest to master. The temporary collapse of Investment Banking can be squarely blamed on bad financial risk management (the banks, execs etc) and people like you, who had money but no financial sense to invest. Your knowledge of Black-Scholes option pricing model and LTCM comes from some new fangled pot boiler that you must have read. You are contumelious to Nobel Laureates, or did you not know that Myron Scholes was awarded the Nobel for Economics (Fischer Black couldn’t be a part of it as he was no more and a Nobel isn't given posthumously, nevertheless he managed to develop the real business cycle theory). Myron Scholes and Robert Merton were among many stalwarts hired for LTCM but that doesn't mean that LTCM fell because of it.
3rd Paragraph: "We do not fully comprehend their language and so we grant them an easy halo" and Manu Joseph also proudly proclaims in his short snippet at the top which gloats that "Manu Joseph became a journalist because he didn't have to crack any objective-type entrance exam to be one". Come on Manu lets just replace the "didn't have to" with CANNOT and life would be simple and spite levels a notch below stratosphere. Wormholes, warps and time reversal/travel etc are usually explained as being quantum phenomena (true or not is a matter of choice or belief) using mathematical tools and language. Maybe its time to buy the latest edition or Arthur Beiser, innit?
4th Paragraph: Ever heard of Particle Physics, its even spelled distinctly and discretely different from MATHEMATICS.
Maybe you should look at Crichton's novels and read some of the bibliographies at the end. It takes a lot of effort to write about something for which you don't even have an aptitude to begin with. For the all- encompassing field of mathematics this is but a sleigh that would just invite a smile on the shallowness of your thought process. Maybe you could start with E.T. Bell's "Men of Mathematics" and read about how common, fascinating and great these mathematicians were as people.
PS: Everytime some one posts a comment here he/she has to go through that image/visual testing that protects you from spam. This is called CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), talk about mathematics :)
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The favorite for Nobel in Physics 2009as punters put it at 3/1 is CERN psi group.Manu for Methodological Frame of the Field is at 7/1. Dismal but the surprise is Nobel for Economics Where Manu (Shanker Mishra) is quoted at 6/1 by European Bookmakers as against no odds by British Bookmakers.Though it is hard to predict because of the way judging is done, Manu Shanker Mishra is no bet.
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Proceedings of Peace Council dated 12/10/2009
Chairman Manu Shanker Mishra presented a synopsis on Cancer Research in terms of Methodological Frame and SemeI. Cancer is considered a combination of genetic propensity and environmental circumstances. For a rotating plane of polarization in cellular space we consider R functional groups. Hetropolymorphic strings of amino acids which are axials and co-axials g+hpphpcg is a spheroid and X the point generator. Incubation we inscribe cubo pentagon and cubo hexagons from hetro cyclic rings which is a linear chain of proteins.The primary structure is positional information as a line with right and left handedness. As helicity is a relativistic invariant a protein folded on other forms is secondary looping and folded upon itself is tertiary looping. As n0 type of in the T which is not countably categorical a linear string of spheres arranged in the form of a cube is quartenary structure and enzymes are 3D structures.The sequence of the bonding H base is the genetic code. The cone rotates lying on its side when stable there is dioxy-ribose with 4 primary N base on frozen vertices.DNA is the nucleic acid which occurs in combination with protein in the chromosome and is of types. In the rotation with varying radius as x is elongated the ribose has a cubo-pentagon which transcribes,edits and acts upon the genetic code. The point generator causes a cross polarization as an analyzer and as operator firms up cellular space for inference. There is an interpolation for m and q.Chemio-therapy relies addition of vertices at the edges ruling out hyperbolic and parabolic catastrophes. Radio-therapy or ionizing radiations use X rays from several different angles to check malignancy. The polarization vector sets up waves which executes rectilinear vibrations and there is a lift of base topology for H(S)=0 on surface genus P.Examining the exponential growth of perturbations there is a topological mixing with sensitivity to initial condition. Error is defined as the difference between the time evolution of the test state and time evolution of a nearby state. Asymptotic stability is necessary for the envelop between oscillations. In a stable system mutation is infrequent. The Institute of Cancer Research, University of London in 2009 found the rare case where the immunity system failed to detect and delete some information which lead to the infection of an unborn baby in the womb.
Ashutosh Rai gave the vote of thanks and suggested that The Nobel Prize Committee 2009 seemed to have overlooked the absence of lift of base topology and trace in the works of the recipients when a pulse is caused in view of changed circumstances.
Prepared by A K Mishra on the basis of discussions.
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This is a standard model.On discussions with Manu Shanker Mishra I came to know that it is based on the case study of late Nivedita Mishra w/o Prof.Shailendra Kr. Mishra.Her profile was Female, Age 40 years with two children aged 20,15 years.Symptoms of fever and low homoglobin appeared and the hospital at Kathmandu, Nepal suggested tests which detected AML,AFL and white cells blast 21%. Next detection of the blast at Mumbai, Tata Memorial Cancer Hospital was 47% oin Sept. 2004.Four cycle treatment of chemotherapy was carried out and after the first cycle the blast was nil.The second ,third and fourth cycle results were positive.In the third recheck blast increase was detected and chemotherapy was restarted wiith higher dose.Even though Pof Shailendra Mishra,himself a mathematician had found that extrapolating from the first round of treatment would leave residues.No bone marrow transplant was undertaken, the Na*,K* imbalance lead to death(11,Feb.2006)
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Oh boy... the comments before me just vindicated Manu's stand...:D
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Wish die hard fans of maths also had a sense of humour to go along...:P:P
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