Skip to main content

Richard Elwes – Four Way Interview

Richard Elwes is a writer, teacher and researcher in Mathematics and a visiting fellow at the University of Leeds. Dr Elwes is passionate about the public understanding of maths, which he promotes at talks and on the radio. His more recent book is Maths 1001.
Why maths?
I don’t know anything else!
I have always enjoyed the subject, and the more I have studied, the more I have realised how incredibly deep it goes, and just how much there is to know. At the same time, I am aware of the gulf between how most people see maths (a horrendous mix of tedious equations and incomprehensible jargon), and how I see it, which is as a whole other world, packed full of amazingly cool, interlocking ideas. So, as well as enjoying studying maths myself, I suppose I have a drive to try to close this gap.
Why this book?
There are two answers, both true.
The first is that I don’t think a book like this has ever been attempted before. Of course, there are plenty of excellent books discussing various mathematical topics for a general audience. But I don’t believe any have tried to be as comprehensive as this. It’s ambitious, there’s no doubt about it, and I was excited by the challenge.
At the same time, there seems to be a gap between ‘popular’ books on one hand, which take a completely equation-free, discursive approach to a mathematical subject, and ’technical’ volumes or textbooks on the other, which go fully into all the gory details. My book treads a middle path. I didn’t want to sex things up too much, I wanted the mathematics to speak for itself, and for the book to work as a reference volume. At the same time, some of the material is undoubtedly difficult and unfamiliar, and people need a way in, to understand what fundamental questions are being addressed. I wanted it to be enjoyable to read, and for people genuinely to learn from it. In some ways, I suppose I wanted to write the book that I would like to have read aged 17.
The second answer is… someone offered me money to write it.
What’s next?
I’m pleased to say that I have a couple of projects in the pipeline. In Spring 2011 I have a book called “How to build a brain (and 34 other really interesting uses of mathematics)” coming out, which has been a fun one to write. It covers some of the same areas as Mathematics 1001, but in a much more light-hearted and less technical style. Perhaps you could guess that from the title.
There are other things in the works too… but it is probably still too early to go into details. I can say that I am looking forward to working on them though!
What’s exciting you at the moment?
Maths 1001 is my first book, and it’s just come out. I’m quite excited about that, to be honest!
Otherwise, I find that the internet makes a wonderful blackboard, these days. There are so many people out there talking about maths, from primary school teachers discussing games kids can play to start to enjoy numbers, right up to Fields medallists presenting their latest research. I follow several mathematical and scientific blogs (I’ve got my own too, may I plug it? www.richardelwes.co.uk/blog Thank you!). It is just fun to be a part of that huge conversation.
In terms of mathematics itself, I have been thinking about recent work by the logician Harvey Friedman, which I find very exciting. It’s a sort of sequel to Kurt Gödel’s famous work. I think it will turn out to be important. I am getting quite interested in ideas from logic to do with provability, computability, and randomness, and how they relate. My background is not in exactly this type of logic, but I do find it fascinating.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more