Excerpt: Strength in Numbers
For centuries, plays, novels, and films (most recently,
A
Beautiful Mind
) have characterized mathematicians as misanthropic
geniuses. But Steve Olson, author of
Count Down: Six Kids Vie for
Glory at the World’s Toughest Math Competition
(Houghton
Mifflin), rejects that stereotype. In summer 2001, the noted journalist
and science writer (his book
Mapping Human History
was a
National Book Award finalist) followed six high school- age kids to the
42nd International Mathematical Olympiad, which took place that year in
Washington, D.C. Almost 500 participants from 83 countries competed,
and the members of the U.S. team, winners of an intense nationwide
selection process, struck Olson as typical teenagers—with the
exception that they were "rabidly interested in games of all sorts." He
stresses, in fact, that while the complex Olympiad problems "involve
only the mathematics that people learn in high school," they also
demand "creativity, daring, and playfulness." These problem-solvers are
"prodigies," not geniuses, he writes, although they do "share the
attributes of genius in one respect: They employ the same intellectual
tools that history’s great creators have." Fittingly,
Olson’s book often links the Olympians’ lives to
mathematicians of the past.
In January 1657, an unusual letter arrived on the desks of many of the leading mathematicians of Europe. Later referred to as "Two Mathematical Problems Posed as Insoluble to French, English, Dutch, and all Mathematicians of Europe by Monsieur deFermat, Councillor of the King in the Parlement of Toulouse," the letter challenged the mathematicians to solve two specific problems: One involved possible ways of evenly dividing a cubed number; the other, possible ways of evenly dividing a squared number. In spirit, the problems were not much different from the problem that would later become known as Fermat’s Last Theorem.
In the 17th century, personal challenges were common in mathematics. At a point when many mathematicians were still amateurs (Fermat, for example, was a lawyer and jurist), they could make their reputations by solving problems that no one else had been able to solve. Many famous scholars of the time, including Isaac Newton and René Descartes, posed and worked on challenge problems. Many kept their procedures secret to maintain an...
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