Piece on Manjul Bhargava, one of this years Fields medal winner. The Fields Medal is often viewed as the greatest honour a mathematician can receive. सत्यं शिवं सुन्दरं /// Every few years, Bhargava’s mother took him to visit his grandparents in Jaipur, India. His grandfather, Purushottam Lal Bhargava, was the head of the Sanskrit department of the University of Rajasthan, and Manjul Bhargava grew up reading ancient mathematics and Sanskrit poetry texts. To his delight, he discovered that the rhythms of Sanskrit poetry are highly mathematical. Bhargava is fond of explaining to his students that the ancient Sanskrit poets figured out the number of different rhythms with a given number of beats that can be constructed using combinations of long and short syllables: It’s the corresponding number in what Western mathematicians call the Fibonacci sequence. Even the Sanskrit alphabet has an inherent mathematical structure, Bhargava discovered: Its first 25 consonants form a 5 by 5 array in which one dimension specifies the bodily organ where the sound originates and the other dimension specifies a quality of modulation. “The mathematical aspect excited me,” he said. /// simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140812-the-musical-magical-number-theorist/
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 04:02:53 +0000