Mathematics is often mentioned in the literature – 04/11/2023 – Marcelo Viana

If I had a real for every time someone told me “I’ve never done well with mathematics, I’m only into the humanities”, I’d be doing very well in life!

In fact, recent advances in neuroscience show that no one is born “with exact sciences”, nor “with humanities”: the human brain is surprisingly plastic, and it is the experiences of the early years, even before school, that influence its receptivity to mathematics in adulthood. Crucial information for parents and guardians…

But there is something else that bothers me about the exact/human dichotomy: the fact that it ignores the myriad connections between these two facets of knowledge. Therefore, I find it very gratifying, among other things, to see how often mathematics is mentioned in the literature, even if the reader does not always realize it. Examples abound: I’ve already written about a few here, but I’m learning about many more.

Englishman Lewis Carrol (1832–1898) was a professor of mathematics. So it’s not surprising that his works “Alice in Wonderland” and “Alice on the Other Side of the Looking Glass” are full of perplexing mathematical paradoxes. “Let’s see: 4 times 5 is 12 and 4 times 6 is 13 and 4 times 7 is… Wow! I’ll never reach 20 this way!”, laments Alice. But it is not a mere game of contradictions: “Alice” is also a satire on mathematics, which was becoming more abstract, with concepts such as imaginary numbers and non-Euclidean geometries that the conservative Carroll repudiated.

In “Cândido”, the famous satirical work of the French thinker Voltaire (1964–1778), the mention of mathematics is ironic, as one would expect. The Bordeaux Academy of Sciences offers a prize to anyone who can explain why Candide’s sheep’s wool is red. And the prize is given “to a sage from the North who demonstrated by A plus B minus C divided by Z that the sheep had to be red and die of smallpox.”

But in the monumental “The Brothers Karamazov”, by Russian Fyodor Doistoyevsky (1821–1881), mathematics touches the very foundations of existence. “You need to note the following: if God exists and if He really created the world, then, as we all know, He created it according to Euclid’s geometry, and the human mind with the conception of only three spatial dimensions,” he says. Ivan Karamazov. And he continues: “However, there were and still are geometers and philosophers, including the most renowned ones, who doubt that the universe and, more broadly, the whole of existence, was created only in the geometry of Euclid. They even dare to to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid never intersect in this world, can meet somewhere in infinity”.

I will continue next week.

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