By the title which sounds like "Life of Pi"you may be wondering if you are here to read a biography or may be my own...I mean Autobiography.But no I do not intend to chronicle a single mathematician in this article although I have done it earlier.
Several people want to know what exactly a mathematician is involved in and this write-up is to clarify this point. Some of you may be thinking we go on cooking up formulae and some others may be thinking that we supply accurate measures to engineers and other technocrats and so on. People have their own imagination. Well one single answer will not represent the entire class of mathematicians. For instance for some cases the first guess written above may be true...yes there are mathematicians who try to discover new formulae or equations. For instance an Indian mathematician S.Minakshisundaram (collaborating with A.Pleijel in the 1950's approximately) gave formulae for trace of a certain operator defined on a Riemannian manifold...This is something to do with harmonics of a vibrating membrane at least for some special cases. There are some other mathematicians who develop a certain philosophy leading to a paradigm shift in the way a class of problems can be looked at. An example for this is one Professor Alexander Grothendieck's work.
Anyways the information to be passed on here is that Mathematics is a huge landscape and there are several varieties of mathematicians one can find. Their work typically involves pen and paper and a lots of discussion and of course coffee. One may be remembering this joke that Mathematicians are the ones who turn coffee cups into theorems!
I recently saw this discussion as to what is a typical day of a mathematician like...? Yes this was a question raised by the commoners to a group of professional mathematicians. He works just as any employee say a software technocrat or a banker. Typically they work for about 8 hours a day but there is more than that actually.Well their talk and their behavior is just like anybody else's except that the mathematician thinks even while he is driving or may be even while he is purchasing vegetables and so on. But the most important thing is that once this thought gets more and more crystallized he gets back to his cabin (either at home or at his office) and writes it out and then refines the thought process and rewrites the stuff and often turns it up into a theorem, a proposition, a calculation or just philosophy!! Now it is not that this is the case every single day. It may so happen that for many days or sometimes even for many months there is no such pure thought coming up. But then some flashes occur suddenly may be in a shopping mall while gazing at a horizon and the excitement comes back...
Several people want to know what exactly a mathematician is involved in and this write-up is to clarify this point. Some of you may be thinking we go on cooking up formulae and some others may be thinking that we supply accurate measures to engineers and other technocrats and so on. People have their own imagination. Well one single answer will not represent the entire class of mathematicians. For instance for some cases the first guess written above may be true...yes there are mathematicians who try to discover new formulae or equations. For instance an Indian mathematician S.Minakshisundaram (collaborating with A.Pleijel in the 1950's approximately) gave formulae for trace of a certain operator defined on a Riemannian manifold...This is something to do with harmonics of a vibrating membrane at least for some special cases. There are some other mathematicians who develop a certain philosophy leading to a paradigm shift in the way a class of problems can be looked at. An example for this is one Professor Alexander Grothendieck's work.
Anyways the information to be passed on here is that Mathematics is a huge landscape and there are several varieties of mathematicians one can find. Their work typically involves pen and paper and a lots of discussion and of course coffee. One may be remembering this joke that Mathematicians are the ones who turn coffee cups into theorems!
I recently saw this discussion as to what is a typical day of a mathematician like...? Yes this was a question raised by the commoners to a group of professional mathematicians. He works just as any employee say a software technocrat or a banker. Typically they work for about 8 hours a day but there is more than that actually.Well their talk and their behavior is just like anybody else's except that the mathematician thinks even while he is driving or may be even while he is purchasing vegetables and so on. But the most important thing is that once this thought gets more and more crystallized he gets back to his cabin (either at home or at his office) and writes it out and then refines the thought process and rewrites the stuff and often turns it up into a theorem, a proposition, a calculation or just philosophy!! Now it is not that this is the case every single day. It may so happen that for many days or sometimes even for many months there is no such pure thought coming up. But then some flashes occur suddenly may be in a shopping mall while gazing at a horizon and the excitement comes back...
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