You have probably heard me mention in the past about the beauty in mathematics. This may seem enigmatic to some of you, but this year I started the year by reiterating the primary reasons that students are required to take math classes. I made a brief PowerPoint presentation with a few quotes. I gave 3 reasons. Foremost, mathematics is the primary instrument in education of teaching and developing logical thinking skills. Second, mathematics is the foundation of advanced studies in science and technology- simply a part of literacy in our advanced economy, and third is simply that mathematics is beautiful. I am not certain that my captive audience of high school math students was very impressed, but I shared with them the following thought I had as I was contemplating live a month or so ago. I should mention, that it was probably at least partially inspired by my summer reading, which brought me to contemplate the various forms of literature.
The problem in general that we encounter in communication is that people, for various reasons, fail to say what they mean and don't necessarily mean what they say. This may be because of sugar-coated attempts of influence, because the communication itself is part of their process of exploration, the urgency to communicate outweighs the need for a well-developed argument, or for aesthetic reasons. Consider the novel, among whose principle aims in engaging the reader involves creating suspense. Suspense comes from ambiguity and the Language follows suit and precision is relatively unimportant. So, we judge fiction beautiful when it contains ambiguities. We revel in the complex metaphors and consider the special rhythm, the pitter-patter the words make as they strike the pallet, and we find it beautiful. But, what if we were to invert these aesthetics and travel in the opposite direction, replacing ambiguity with certainty and nuance with clarity. What if instead I begin with plain assumptions and proceed with unobstructed intention and unambiguous meanings. The result is the language of pure reason, the language of oure ideas, the conversation of Mathematics, and it is also beautiful.
