April: National Mathematics Awareness Month

Recently, someone asked me how many of the following names I recognized:

Derek Jeter, Andrei Markov, Sandra Bullock, Lev Pontryagin, Drew Brees, Isaac
Schoenberg, Taylor Swift, and Leonard Euler, and I’d like to pose the same question to
you. My guess is you will recognize four persons. Actually, my quiz is a fraud. It’s just
my awkward way of announcing that April is National Mathematics Awareness Month,
and to hammer the point that although mathematics and mathematical discoveries never
make headlines like winning a World Series, Oscar, Super Bowl, or a Grammy, they
might play a more important role in our daily lives. And that’s where the four
unrecognizable names #s 2, 4, 6, and 8 come in.

Let me first tell you about mystery person #2 on the list, Andrei Markov.
Markov was a Russian mathematician who in 1906 worked out a mathematical theory,
called Markov Chains, for describing how many physical systems evolve over time.
Such a system might be anything from a baseball game, a frog jumping from lily pad to
lily pad, the evolution of a biological population like bacteria or a virus, or even a person
surfing the internet, clicking from one webpage to another.

Although Markov did not have any specific application in mind for his theory,
today Markov Chains are used by engineers and scientists the world over. When Google
decided upon a strategy for ranking webpages, they imagined a person starting at some
webpage, then moving from page to page. This can lead to dead ends at pages that have
no outgoing links or around endless clicks of interconnected pages. This type of random
walk is called a Markov Chain and using Markov’s theory, it’s possible to find the
fraction of time the surfer will spend at each page. Suppose a person surfs the web an
infinite number of times. Of course, no real human can but we can imagine it
mathematically, and it’s possible to compute the fraction of times our imaginary person
will spend at each page, and this fraction is what Google calls the PageRank of the
webpage. A webpage will have a high PageRank if it has links from other pages of high
rank. If you enter the keyword “mathematics” in the Google search engine, the webpages
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that show up will be ones with the highest PageRank for that keyword. Markov, who
died in 1922, would be amazed at how his discovery is being applied today.

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So, who is the second person on your list of unknowns? Lev Pontryagin was a
Russian mathematician who went blind at age 14 in 1922, but whose mother, although
not a mathematician, read mathematics books to him. He went on to become one of the
great mathematicians of the 20th century. In the 1950s he discovered an equation which
must be true if certain physical systems behave in an efficient or what Pontryagin called
an optimal manner, and by “optimal” he meant something like using the least amount of
fuel, or performing something in the least amount of time, or doing something with
minimum cost. Pontryagin’s equation, known today as the Pontryagin Maximum
Principle, is used in many areas of engineering, economics, and science, from docking
two spacecraft using minimum fuel, to controlling industrial robots in the least amount of
time, to the optimal control of blood glucose levels in diabetics, or even a fun problem of
determining the shape of a children’s slide that will guarantee a child will reach the
bottom in minimum time.

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Today, we are in a golden age of mathematics. If you want to see just a few ways
mathematics is affecting our lives, go to http://www.ams.org/mathmoments , a site run by
the American Mathematical Society.

So, who is #3 on your don’t-know list? In the 1940s while a professor of

mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, Romanian/American mathematician Isaac
Schoenberg developed a theory of splines. Splines are special kinds of curves and
surfaces that have a nice appearance and can be manipulated easily with a computer.
However, the use of splines requires many arithmetic calculations so Schoenberg’s theory
was more or less on the shelf. Now however with today’s ultra-fast computers, splines
are back with a vengeance with applications ranging from the design of automobile
bodies and parts, to the images you see in animated movies, to computer-aided
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fabrication of prosthetic limbs, to the milling of dental restorations, such as inlays,

crowns, and bridges

Nowadays, in the digital age of dentistry, when your dentist recommends a new
crown for a decayed or broken tooth, he or she begins by removing the decay and
reshaping the tooth so it can receive the crown, then takes photographs of the reshaped
tooth and surrounding area, then sends the images to a computer, whereupon the
computer digitizes them and computes the shape of a crown that will fit perfectly over the
prepared tooth. This new crown is, of course, inside the computer in the form of a
mathematical spline, which means it is made up of maybe 1,000 cubic polynomial
equations, each equation describing a tiny region of the tooth. Each of these 1,000
equations requires 16 numbers to define it, hence the computer requires 16,000 numbers
to describe the crown. This virtual crown is then displayed on a screen where the dentist
or dental assistant fine-tunes it with a computer mouse or similar devise so it will not rub
against neighboring teeth and have the desired characteristics, all the while the computer
is number-crunching the 16,000 numbers that defines the crown. After the crown is
deemed satisfactory, the dentist then clicks a button on the computer screen and the
16,000 numbers that mathematically describe the virtual crown are sent electronically to
a milling machine where after a few minutes a block of porcelain is converted to the
desired crown, whereupon the dentist cements it in place in your mouth.

*****

Why it is so many people are turned off to mathematics? Someone said it’s the
“piano syndrome.” Learning to play the piano and learning elementary mathematics have
some similarities. In both cases the beginner must pass through a rigid orientation. The
beginning pianist spends months developing finger dexterity by playing scale after scale.
In mathematics children first learn to count, then learn arithmetic, algebra, and so on, all
subjects often associated with drill and monotony. Only after the basics are mastered can
a student of the piano interpret a Chopin concerto or the student of mathematics build
mathematical worlds. It is unfortunate that beginning students of mathematics never
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survive their rigid introduction to see the exciting and wonderful math world that lies
beyond.

So, who is the last person on your unknowns list? I’ve saved the best for last.
Leonard Euler was a Swiss mathematician born in 1707, and without his mathematical
contributions in many areas of mathematics -- including number theory, calculus,
differential equations, and on and on -- our world would be a different place. In 1736 the
city of Konigsberg in Prussia (now Russia) was nestled along both sides of the Pregel
River. The river was dotted with small islands connected by a series of bridges joining
both them and the riverbanks, and it was a popular pastime for families to stroll the
bridges, trying to traverse each bridge only once, and returning to the starting point. No
one had ever managed such a tour, and people began to think it was impossible.

Euler learned of the problem and proved that such a tour was impossible and in
the process started the mathematical topic of graph theory, an area of mathematics that is
becoming more and more important as the world becomes more interconnected. Euler’s
graph is simply a collection of dots representing anything you might imagine: people,
places, things, airports, road intersections, junction points of an integrated circuit, and so
on. The dots can be connected by lines, which provide information on whether the dots
are related in some manner: if the dots represented airports, a line between two dots
might mean there are flights between the airports. The streets and intersections in the city
of Bangor is a graph, and a typical graph problem would be to adjust the timing of
stoplights, assignment of one-way streets, and other strategies to maximize traffic flow.
Many large cities like Boston have such automated traffic control systems. As the world
becomes more and more interconnected, Euler’s graphs are playing a critical role in
keeping things running smoothly.

Today there are many useful math websites for persons of all interests and
expertise. A great website to get information on almost any math topic is
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/.