Aestheti

s for the Working Mathemati ian

Jonathan M. Borwein, FRSC

Canada Resear h Chair, Shrum Professor of S ien e & Dire tor CECM
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC Canada
Prepared for Queens University Symposium on

Beauty and the Mathemati al Beast: Mathemati s and Aestheti s

April 18, 2001

William Blake
\And I made a rural pen,
And I stained the water lear,
And I wrote my happy songs,
Every hild may joy to hear."
From Songs of Inno en e and Experien e

AMS Classi ations: 00A30, 00A35, 97C50

Key Words: aestheti s, experimental mathemati s, onstru tivism, integer

relations, pi

Resear h supported by NSERC, MITACS-NCE and the Canada Resear h Chair

Program.

Introdu tion

\If my tea hers had begun by telling me that mathemati s was pure
play with presuppositions, and wholly in the air, I might have be ome
a good mathemati ian. But they were overworked drudges, and I was
largely inattentive, and in lined lazily to attribute to in apa ity in
myself or to a literary temperament that dullness whi h perhaps was
due simply to la k of initiation." (George Santayana1)
Most resear h mathemati ians neither think deeply about nor are terribly
on erned about either pedagogy or the philosophy of mathemati s. Nonetheless, as I hope to indi ate, aestheti notions have always permeated (pure and
applied) mathemati s. And the top resear hers have always been driven by an
aestheti imperative:

\We all believe that mathemati s is an art. The author of a book,

the le turer in a lassroom tries to onvey the stru tural beauty of
mathemati s to his readers, to his listeners. In this attempt, he
must always fail. Mathemati s is logi al to be sure, ea h on lusion
is drawn from previously derived statements. Yet the whole of it,
the real pie e of art, is not linear; worse than that, its per eption
should be instantaneous. We have all experien ed on some rare o asions the feeling of elation in realizing that we have enabled our
listeners to see at a moment's glan e the whole ar hite ture and all
its rami ations." (Emil Artin, 1898-19622):
I shall similarly argue for aestheti s before utility. Through a suite of examples3 , I aim to illustrate how and what that means at the resear h mine fa e. I
also will argue that the opportunities to tie resear h and tea hing to aestheti s
are almost boundless | at all levels of the urri ulum. 4 This is in part due to
the in reasing power and sophisti ation of visualization, geometry, algebra and
other mathemati al software.

1.1 Aestheti s(s) a ording to Webster

Let us nish this introdu tion by re ording what one di tionary says:

aestheti , adj 1. pertaining to a sense of the beautiful or to the s ien e of

aestheti s.

1 \Persons and Pla es," 1945,

2 Quoted by Ram Murty in

238{9.

Mathemati al Conversations, Sele tions from The Mathemati al

Intelligen er
, ompiled by Robin Wilson and Jeremy Gray, Springer-Verlag, New York, 2000.
3

The transparen ies, and other resour es, expanding the presentation that this paper is
based on are available at
www. e m.sfu. a/personal/jborwein/talks.html,
www. e m.sfu. a/personal/jborwein/math amp00.html and
www. e m.sfu. a/ersonal/loki/Papers/Numbers/.
4 An ex ellent middle s hool illustration is des ribed in Nathalie Sin lair's \The aestheti s
is relevant," for the learning of mathemati s, 21 (2001), 25-32.

2. having a sense of the beautiful; hara terized by a love of beauty.

3. pertaining to, involving, or on erned with pure emotion and sensation
as opposed to pure intelle tuality.
4. a philosophi al theory or idea of what is aestheti ally valid at a given time
and pla e: the lean lines, bare surfa es, and sense of spa e that bespeak the
ma hine-age aestheti .
5. aestheti s.
6. Ar hai . the study of the nature of sensation.
Also, estheti . Syn 2. dis riminating, ultivated, rened.
aestheti s, noun 1. the bran h of philosophy dealing with su h notions as
the beautiful, the ugly, the sublime, the omi , et ., as appli able to the ne
arts, with a view to establishing the meaning and validity of riti al judgments
on erning works of art, and the prin iples underlying or justifying su h judgments.
2. the study of the mind and emotions in relation to the sense of beauty.
Personally, I would require (unexpe ted) simpli ity or organization in apparent omplexity or haos, onsistent with views of Dewey, Santayana and others.
We need to integrate this aestheti into mathemati s edu ation so as to apture
minds not only for utilitarian reasons. I do believe deta hment is an important
omponent of the aestheti experien e, thus it is important to provide some urtains, stages, s aolds and pi ture frames and their mathemati al equivalents.
Fear of mathemati s does not hasten an aestheti response.
2

Gauss, Hadamard and Hardy

Three of my personal mathemati al heroes, very dierent men from dierent

times, all testify interestingly on the aestheti and the nature of mathemati s.

2.1 Gauss
Carl Friedri h Gauss (1777-1855) on e onfessed5 ,

\I have the result, but I do not yet know how to get it."
One of Gauss's greatest dis overies, in 1799, was the relationship between
the lemnis ate sine fun tion and the arithmeti -geometri mean iteration. This
was based on a purely omputational observation. The young Gauss wrote in
his diary that the result \will surely open up a whole new eld of analysis."
He was right, as it pried open the whole vista of nineteenth entury ellipti
and modular fun tion theory. Gauss's spe i dis overy, based on tables of
integrals provided by Stirling (1692-1770), was that the re ipro al of the integral
2

Z
0

p dt
1

t4

5 See \Isaa Asimov's Book of S ien e and Nature Quotations," Isaa Asimov and J. A.
Shulman (eds.), Weideneld and Ni olson", New York (1988), 115.

agreed numeri ally

p with the limit of the rapidly onvergent iteration given by
a0 := 1; b0 := 2 and omputing

an+1 :=

an + bn
2

bn+1 :=

an bn

The sequen es an ; bn have a ommon limit 1:1981402347355922074 : : : .

Whi h obje t, the integral or the iteration, is more familiar, whi h is more
elegant | then and now? Aestheti riteria hange: ` losed forms' have yielded
entre stage to `re ursion' mu h as biologi al and omputational metaphors
(even `biology envy`) have repla ed Newtonian mental images with Ri hard
Dawkin's `the blind wat hmaker`.

2.2 Hadamard
A onstru tivist, experimental and aestheti driven rationale for mathemati s
ould hardly do better than to start with:

The obje t of mathemati al rigor is to san tion and legitimize the

onquests of intuition, and there was never any other obje t for it.

(J. Hadamard6 )

Ja ques Hadamard (1865-1963) was perhaps the greatest mathemati ian to

think deeply and seriously about ognition in mathemati s7 . He is quoted as
saying \... in arithmeti , until the seventh grade, I was last or nearly last" whi h
should give en ouragement to many young students.
Hadamard was both the author of \The psy hology of invention in the mathemati al eld" (1945), a book that still rewards lose inspe tion, and o-prover
of the Prime Number Theorem (1896):

\The number of primes less than n tends to 1 as does

log n

."

This was one of the ulminating results of 19th entury mathemati s and one
that relied on mu h preliminary omputation and experimentation.

2.3 Hardy's Apology

Correspondingly G. H. Hardy (1877-1947), the leading British analyst of the rst
half of the twentieth entury was also a stylish author who wrote ompellingly
in defense of pure mathemati s. He noted that

\All physi ists and a good many quite respe table mathemati ians
are ontemptuous about proof."

6 In E. Borel, \Le ons sur la theorie des fon tions," 1928, quoted by George Polya in Mathemati al dis overy: On understanding, learning, and tea hing problem solving (Combined

Edition), New York, John Wiley (1981), pp. 2-126.

7 Other than Poin ar
e?

in his apologia, \A Mathemati ian's Apology". The Apology is a spirited defense of beauty over utility:

\Beauty is the rst test. There is no permanent pla e in the world

for ugly mathemati s."
That said, his omment that

\Real mathemati s : : : is almost wholly `useless'."

has been over-played and is now to my mind very dated, given the importan e
of ryptography and other pie es of algebra and number theory devolving from
very pure study. But he does a knowledge that

\If the theory of numbers ould be employed for any pra ti al and
obviously honourable purpose, ..."
even Gauss would be persuaded.
The Apology is one of Amazon's best sellers. And the existen e of Amazon,
or Google, means that I an be less than thorough with my bibliographi details
without derailing a reader who wishes to nd the sour e.
Hardy, in his tribute to Ramanujan entitled \Ramanujan, Twelve Le tures
: : : ," page 15, gives the so- alled `Skewes number' as a \striking example of a
false onje ture". The integral
li x =

Z x
0

dt

log t

is a very good approximation to  (x), the number of primes not ex eeding x.

Thus, li 108 = 5; 761; 455 while  (108 ) = 5; 762; 209:
It was onje tured that
li x >  (x)
holds for all x and indeed it so for many x. Skewes in 1933 showed the rst
1034
expli it rossing at 1010 . This has by now been now redu ed to a relatively
tiny number, a mere 101167 , still vastly beyond dire t omputational rea h.
Su h examples show for ibly the limits on numeri experimentation, at least
of a naive variety. Many will be familiar with the `Law of large numbers' in
statisti s. Here we see what some number theorists all the `Law of small numbers': all small numbers are spe ial, many are primes and dire t experien e is a
poor guide. And sadly or happily depending on one's attitude even 101166 may
be a small number.
We shall meet Ramanujan again in the sequel.
3

Resear h motivations and goals

As a omputational and experimental pure mathemati ian my main goal is:

insight. Insight demands speed and in reasingly parallelism as des ribed in an
5

arti le I re ently oauthored on hallenges for mathemati al omputing.8 Speed

and enough spa e is a prerequisite:




For rapid veri ation.

For validation and falsi ation; proofs and refutations.

What is `easy' is hanging and we see an ex iting merging of dis iplines,

levels and ollaborators. We are more and more able to:





Marry theory & pra ti e, history & philosophy, proofs & experiments.
Mat h elegan e and balan e to utility and e onomy.
Inform all mathemati al modalities omputationally: analyti , algebrai ,
geometri & topologi al.

This is leading us towards an Experimental Mathodology as a philosophy and

in pra ti e.9 It is based on:

Meshing omputation and mathemati s | intuition is a quired. Blake's

inno ent may be ome the shepherd.

Visualization | three is a lot of dimensions. Nowadays we an exploit

pi tures, sounds and other hapti stimuli.

`Caging' and `Monster-barring' (in Imre Lakatos' words). Two parti ularly
useful omponents are:

{ graphi he ks: omparing 2py

y and py ln(y); 0 < y < 1 pi -

torially is a mu h more rapid way to divine whi h is larger that

traditional analyti methods.
{ randomized he ks: of equations, linear algebra, or primality an
provide enormously se ure knowledge or ounter-examples when deterministi methods are doomed.

My own methodology depends heavily on:

1. (High Pre ision) omputation of obje t(s) for subsequent examination.
2. Pattern Re ognition of Real Numbers (e.g., using CECM's Inverse Cal ulator and 'RevEng')10 , or Sequen es (e'g., using Salvy & Zimmermann's
`gfun' or Sloane and Ploue's Online En y lopedia).
8 J.M.

Borwein and P.B. Borwein, \Challenges for Mathemati al Computing," Computing

in S ien e
& Engineering, May/June 3 (2001), 48-53. [CECM Preprint 00:1605
9

Jonathan M. Borwein and Robert Corless, \Emerging tools for experimental mathemati s," Ameri an Mathemati al Monthly, 106 (1999), 889-909. [CECM Preprint 98:110.
10 ISC spa e limits have hanged from 10Mb being a onstraint in 1985 to 10Gb being `easily
available' today.

3. Extensive use of Integer Relation Methods: PSLQ & LLL and FFT.11
Ex lusion bounds are espe ially useful and su h methods provide a great
test bed for `Experimental Mathemati s'.
4. Some automated theorem proving (using methods of Wilf-Zeilberger et ).
All these tools are a essible through the listed CECM websites.

3.1 Pi tures and symbols

\If I an give an abstra t proof of something, I'm reasonably happy.
But if I an get a on rete, omputational proof and a tually produ e
numbers I'm mu h happier. I'm rather an addi t of doing things on
the omputer, be ause that gives you an expli it riterion of what's
going on. I have a visual way of thinking, and I'm happy if I an
see a pi ture of what I'm working with." (John Milnor12 )
Let us onsider the following images of zeroes of 0=1 polynomials that are
manipulatable at www. e m.sfu. a/interfa es/. These images are also shown
and des ribed in my re ent survey paper.13 In this ase graphi output allows
insight no amount of numbers ould.
We have been building edu ational software with these pre epts embedded, su h as LetsDoMath.14 The intent is to hallenge students honestly (e.g.,
through allowing subtle exploration within the `Game of Life') while making
things tangible (e.g., Platoni solids oer virtual manipulables that are more
robust and expressive that the standard lassroom solids!).
But symbols are often more reliable than pi tures. The following pi ture
purports to be eviden e that a solid an fail to be polyhedral at only one point.
It is the steps up to pixel level of ins ribing a regular 2n+1 -gon at height 21 n .
But ultimately su h a onstru tion fails and produ es a right ir ular one. The
false eviden e in this pi ture held ba k a resear h proje t for several days!
11 Des ribed as one of the top ten \Algorithm's for the Ages," Random Samples, S ien e,
Feb. 4, 2000.
12 Quoted in Who got Einstein's O e? by Ed Regis { a delightful 1986 history of the
Institute for Advan ed Study.
13 D.H. Bailey and J.M. Borwein, \Experimental Mathemati s: Re ent Developments and
Future Outlook," in Mathemati s Unlimited | 2 1 and Beyond, B. Engquist and W. S hmid
(Eds.), Springer-Verlag, 2000, ISBN 3-540-66913-2. [CECM Preprint 99:143
14 See www.mathresour es. om.

3.2 Four kinds of experiment

Medawar usefully distinguishes four forms of s ienti experiment.

1. The Kantian example: generating \the lassi al non-Eu lidean geome-

tries (hyperboli , ellipti ) by repla ing Eu lid's axiom of parallels (or something
equivalent to it) with alternative forms."
2. The Ba onian experiment is a ontrived as opposed to a natural happening,
it \is the onsequen e of `trying things out' or even of merely messing about."
3. Aristotelian demonstrations: \apply ele trodes to a frog's s iati nerve,
and lo, the leg ki ks; always pre ede the presentation of the dog's dinner with
the ringing of a bell, and lo, the bell alone will soon make the dog dribble."
4. The most important is Galilean: \a riti al experiment { one that dis riminates between possibilities and, in doing so, either gives us onden e in the
view we are taking or makes us think it in need of orre tion."
The rst three forms are ommon in mathemati s, the fourth is not. It is
also the only one of the four forms whi h has the promise to make Experimental
Mathemati s into a serious repli able s ienti enterprise.1516
4

Two things about

p2 : : :

Remarkably one an still nd new insights in the oldest areas:

Advi e to a Young S ientist, Harper (1979).

15 From Peter Medawar's wonderful

16 See also: D.H. Bailey and J.M. Borwein,

ments and Future Outlook."

\Experimental Mathemati s: Re ent Develop-

4.1 Irrationality
We present graphi ally,
Tom Apostol's lovely new geometri proof
p

17

rationality of

2.

of the ir-

PROOF. Consider the smallest right-angled iso eles integral with integer sides.

Cir ums ribe a ir le of length the verti al side and onstru t the tangent on
the hypotenuse.

The square root of 2 is irrational

The smaller iso eles triangle is again integral

4.2 Rationality
p

2 also makes things rational:



p2 p2

p p

( 2
2)
= 2
=

Hen e by the prin iple of the ex luded middle:

p2

2 = 2:

p2

Either 2 2 Q or 2 62 Q:
In either ase we an dedu e that there are irrational numbers  and 
with  rational. But how do we know whi h ones? One may build a whole
mathemati al philosophy proje t around this. Compare the assertion that

 := 2 and  := 2 ln2 (3) yield  = 3

17

MAA Monthly, November 2000, 241-242.

as Maple onrms. This illustrates ni ely that veri ation is often easier than
dis overy (similarly the fa t multipli ation is easier than fa torization is at the
base of se ure en ryption s hemes for e- ommer e). There are eight possible
(ir)rational triples:
 = ;
and nding examples of all ases is now a ne student proje t.

4.3

and two integrals

Even Maple knows  =
6
sin e
:::

22
7

0<

(1

22
x)4 x4
dx =
1 + x2
7

;

though it would be prudent to ask `why' it an perform the evaluation and

`whether' to trust it? In ontrast, Maple struggles with the following sophomore's dream:
Z 1
1 1
X
1
dx
=
x
n;
0

n=1

and students asked to onrm this typi ally mistake numeri al validation for
symboli proof.
Again we see that omputing adds reality, making on rete the abstra t, and
makes some hard things simple. This is strikingly the ase in Pas al's Triangle:
www. e m.sfu. a/interfa es/ aords an emphati example where deep fra tal stru ture is exhibited in the elementary binomial oe ients. Berlinski writes

\The omputer has in turn hanged the very nature of mathemati al experien e, suggesting for the rst time that mathemati s, like
physi s, may yet be ome an empiri al dis ipline, a pla e where things
are dis overed be ause they are seen."
and ontinues

\ The body of mathemati s to whi h the al ulus gives rise embodies

a ertain swashbu kling style of thinking, at on e bold and dramati ,
given over to large intelle tual gestures and indierent, in large measure, to any very detailed des ription of the world. It is a style that
has shaped the physi al but not the biologi al s ien es, and its su ess
in Newtonian me hani s, general relativity and quantum me hani s
is among the mira les of mankind.
But the era in thought that the al ulus made possible is oming
to an end. Everyone feels this is so and everyone is right." (David
Berlinski18 )
18 Two

quotes I agree with from Berlinski's \A Tour of the Cal ulus," Pantheon Books, 1995

10

and friends

My resear h with my brother on  also oers aestheti and empiri al opportunities. The next algorithm grew out of work of Ramanujan.

5.1

A quarti algorithm

Set a0 = 6

4 2 and y0 = 2

yk+1 =

(1)

(Borwein & Borwein 1984)

1. Iterate
1 (1
1 + (1

yk4 )1=4
yk4 )1=4

ak+1 = ak (1 + yk+1 )4 b 22k+3 yk+1 (1 + yk+1 + yk2+1 )

(2)

Then ak onverges quarti ally to 1= .

We have exhibited 19 pairs of simple algebrai equations (1, 2) that written
out in full still t on one page and dier from  (the most elebrated trans endental number) only after 700 billion digits. After 17 years, this still gives me
an aestheti buzz!
This iteration has been used sin e 1986, with the Salamin-Brent s heme, by
Bailey (Lawren e Berkeley Labs) and by Kanada (Tokyo). In 1997, Kanada
omputed over 51 billion digits on a Hita hi super omputer (18 iterations, 25
hrs on 210 pu's). His present world re ord is 236 digits in April 1999. A billion
(230 ) digit omputation has been performed on a single Pentium II PC in under
9 days.
The 50 billionth de imal digit of  or of 1 is 042 ! And after 18 billion digits,
0123456789 has nally appeared and Brouwer's famous intuitionist example now
onverges!19

5.1.1 A further taste of Ramanujan

G. N. Watson, dis ussing his response to su h formulae of the wonderful Indian
mathemati al genius Ramanujan (1887-1920), des ribes:

\a thrill whi h is indistinguishable from the thrill I feel when I enter

the Sagrestia Nuovo of the Capella Medi i and see before me the austere beauty of the four statues representing `Day,' `Night,' `Evening,'
and `Dawn' whi h Mi helangelo has set over the tomb of Guiliano
de'Medi i and Lorenzo de'Medi i." (G. N. Watson, 1886-1965)
One of these is Ramanujan's remarkable formula, based upon the ellipti
and modular fun tion theory initiated by Gauss,
1


19 Details

1 (4k)! (1103 + 26390k)

2 2X
:
=
9801 k=0
(k !)4 3964k

about  are at www. e m.sfu. a/personal/jborwein/pi over.html.

11

Ea h term of this series produ es

an additional eight orre t digits in the result
p
| and only the ultimate 2 is not a rational operation. Bill Gosper used this
formula to ompute 17 million terms of the ontinued fra tion for  in 1985.
This is of interest be ause we still an not prove that the ontinued fra tion for
 is unbounded. Again everyone knows this is true.
That said, Ramanujan prefers related expli it forms su h as
log(6403203)
p
= 3:1415926535897930164  ;
163
orre t until the underlined pla es.
The number e is the easiest trans endental to fast ompute (by ellipti
methods). One `dierentiates' e t to obtain algorithms su h as above for  ,
via the (AGM).

5.2 Integer relation dete tion

We make a brief digression to des ribe what integer relation dete tion methods
do.20 We then apply them to  .21

5.2.1 The uses of LLL and PSLQ

DEFINITION: A ve tor (x1 ; x2 ;


; xn ) of reals possesses an integer relation
if there are integers ai not all zero with
0 = a1 x1 + a2 x2 +


+ an xn :

PROBLEM: Find ai if su h exist. If not, obtain lower `ex lusion' bounds on

the size of possible ai .
SOLUTION: For n = 2, Eu lid's algorithm gives a solution. For n  3, Euler,
Ja obi, Poin are, Minkowski, Perron, and many others sought methods. The

rst general algorithm was found in 1977 by Ferguson & For ade. Sin e '77
one has many variants: LLL (also in Maple and Mathemati a), HJLS, PSOS,
PSLQ ('91, parallelized '99).

Integer Relation Dete tion was re ently ranked among \the 10 algorithms
with the greatest in uen e on the development and pra ti e of s ien e and engineering in the 20th entury," by J. Dongarra and F. Sullivan in Computing in
S ien e & Engineering, 2 (2000), 22-23. Also listed were: Monte Carlo, Simplex, Krylov Subspa e, QR De omposition, Qui ksort, ..., FFT, Fast Multipole
Method.
20 These may be
21 See also J.M.

Dis rete

tried at www. e m.sfu. a/proje ts/IntegerRelations/.

Borwein and P. Lisonek, \Appli ations of Integer Relation Algorithms,"
Mathemati s, 217 (2000), 65-82. [CECM Resear h Report 97:104

12

5.2.2 Algebrai numbers

Asking about algebrai ity is handled by omputing  to su iently high pre ision (O(n = N 2 )) and apply LLL or PSLQ to the ve tor
(1; ; 2 ;


; N 1 ):

Solution integers, ai , are oe ients of a polynomial likely satised by .

If one has omputed  to n + m digits and run LLL using n of them, one
has m digits to heuristi ally onrm the result. I have never seen this
return an honest `false positive' for m > 20 say.

If no relation is found, ex lusion bounds are obtained, saying for example

that any polynomial of degree less than N must have the Eu lidean norm
of its oe ients in ex ess of L (often astronomi al).

5.2.3 Finalizing formulae

If we know or suspe t an identity exists integer relations methods are very
powerful.

(Ma hin's Formula). We try Maple's lin dep fun tion on

[ar tan(1); ar tan(1=5); ar tan(1=239)
and `re over' [1, -4, 1. That is,


4

1
= 4 ar tan( )
5

ar tan(

1
):
239

Ma hin's formula was used on all serious omputations of  from 1706

(100 digits) to 1973 (1 million digits). After 1980, the methods des ribed
above started to be used instead.

(Dase's Formula). We try lin dep on

[=4; ar tan(1=2); ar tan(1=5); ar tan(1=8)
and re over [-1, 1, 1, 1. That is,


4

1
1
1
= ar tan( ) + ar tan( ) + ar tan( ):
2
5
8

This was used by Dase to ompute 200 digits of  in his head in perhaps
the greatest feat of mental arithmeti ever | ` 1/8' is apparently better
than `1/239' for this purpose.

13

5.3 Johann Martin Za harias Dase

Another burgeoning omponent of modern resear h and tea hing life is a ess to
ex ellent (and dubious) databases su h as the Ma Tutor History Ar hive maintained at: www-history.m s.st-andrews.a .uk. One may nd details there
on almost all the mathemati ians appearing in this arti le. We illustrate its
value by showing verbatim what it says about Dase.
\Za harias Dase (1824-1861) had in redible al ulating skills but little mathemati al ability. He gave exhibitions of his al ulating powers in Germany, Austria and England. While in Vienna in 1840 he
was urged to use his powers for s ienti purposes and he dis ussed
proje ts with Gauss and others.
Dase used his al ulating ability to al ulate to 200 pla es in 1844.
This was published in Crelle's Journal for 1844. Dase also onstru ted 7 gure log tables and produ ed a table of fa tors of all
numbers between 7 000 000 and 10 000 000.
Gauss requested that the Hamburg A ademy of S ien es allow Dase
to devote himself full-time to his mathemati al work but, although
they agreed to this, Dase died before he was able to do mu h more
work.\

5.4

`Pentium farming'

for binary digits.

Bailey, P. Borwein and Ploue (1996) dis overed a series for  (and orresponding ones for some other polylogarithmi onstants) whi h somewhat dis on ertingly allows one to ompute hexade imal digits of  without omputing prior
digits. The algorithm needs very little memory and no multiple pre ision. The
running time grows only slightly faster than linearly in the order of the digit
being omputed.
The key, found by `PSLQ', as des ribed above, is:

=

1
X

k=0

1
16

k

4
8k + 1

2
8k + 4

1
8k + 5

1

8k + 6

Knowing an algorithm would follow they spent several months hunting by omputer for su h a formula. On e found, it is easy to prove in Mathemati a, in
Maple or by hand | and provides a very ni e al ulus exer ise.
This was a most su essful ase of
REVERSE MATHEMATICAL ENGINEERING
This is entirely pra ti able, God rea hes her hand deep into  : in September
1997 Fabri e Bellard (INRIA) used a variant of this formula to ompute 152
binary digits of  , starting at the trillionth position (1012 ). This took 12 days
on 20 work-stations working in parallel over the Internet.
14

5.4.1 Per ival on the web

In August 1998 Colin Per ival (SFU, age 17) nished a similar naturally or \embarrassingly parallel" omputation of the ve trillionth bit (using 25 ma hines
at about 10 times the speed of Bellard). In hexade imal notation he obtained:
07E 45733CC 790B 5B 5979:
The orresponding binary digits of  starting at the 40 trillionth pla e are
00000111110011111:
By September 2000, the quadrillionth bit had been found to be `0' (using 250
pu years on 1734 ma hines from 56 ountries). Starting at the 999; 999; 999; 999; 997th
bit of  one has:
111000110001000010110101100000110:
6

Solid and dis rete geometry

6.1 De Morgan
Augustus De Morgan, one of the most in uential edu ators of his period, wrote:

\Considerable obsta les generally present themselves to the beginner,

in studying the elements of Solid Geometry, from the pra ti e whi h
has hitherto uniformly prevailed in this ountry, of never submitting
to the eye of the student, the gures on whose properties he is reasoning, but of drawing perspe tive representations of them upon a
plane. ... I hope that I shall never be obliged to have re ourse to
a perspe tive drawing of any gure whose parts are not in the same
plane."

(Augustus De Morgan, 1806-71, First London Mathemati al So iety

President.22 )

I imagine that De Morgan would have been happier using JavaViewLib:

www. e m.sfu. a/interfa es/. This is Konrad Polthier's modern version of

Felix Klein's (1840-1928) famous geometri models. Correspondingly, a modern

intera tive version of Eu lid is provided by Cinderella.de, whi h is illustrated at
personal/jborwein/ ir le.html, and is largely omparable to Geometer's
Sket hpad whi h is dis ussed in detail in other papers in this volume. Klein, like
DeMorgan, was equally in uential as an edu ator and as a resear her.
22 From Adrian Ri e, \What Makes a Great Mathemati s Tea her?" MAA Monthly, June
1999, p. 540.

15

6.2 Sylvester's theorem

\The early study of Eu lid made me a hater of geometry."

(James Joseph Sylvester, 1814-97, Se ond London Mathemati al So iety President.23 )

But dis rete geometry (now mu h in fashion as ` omputational geometry'

and another example of very useful pure mathemati s) was dierent:

THEOREM. Given N non- ollinear points in the plane there is a proper line
through only two points.24
Sylvester's onje ture was it seems forgotten for 50 years. It was rst established |\badly" in the sense that the proof is mu h more ompli ated | by
Gallai (1943) and also by Paul Erdos who named `the Book' in whi h God keeps
aestheti ally perfe t proofs. Erdos was an atheist. Kelly's proof was a tually
published by Donald Coxeter in the MAA Monthly in 1948! A ne example of
how the ar hival re ord may get obs ured.

6.3 Kelly's \Proof from `The Book' "

Sylvester

PROOF. Consider the point losest to a line it is not on and suppose that line
has three points on it (the horizontal line).
The middle of those three points is learly loser to the other line!
23 In D. Ma Hale,
24 Posed in

\Comi Se tions" (1993).

The Edu ational Times, 59 (1893).

16

 As with our proof of the irrationality of

minimal onguration.

2 we see the power of the right

Two more examples that belong in `the Book' are aorded by:

Niven's marvellous half page 1947 proof that  is irrational

(See www. e m.sfu. a/personal/jborwein/pi.pdf); and

Snell's law | does one use the Cal ulus to establish the Physi s, or use
physi al intuition to tea h students how to avoid tedious al ulations?

Partitions and patterns

Another subje t that an be made highly a essible is additive number theory,

espe ially partition theory. The number of additive partitions of n, p(n), is
generated by
Y
P (q) := (1 qn ) 1 :
n1

Thus p(5) = 7 sin e

5= 4+1 =3+2 =3+1+1 = 2+2+1
= 2 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1:

QUESTION: How hard is p(n) to ompute | in 1900 (for Ma Mahon) and

in 2000 (for Maple)?
ANSWER: Se onds for Maple, months for Ma Mahon. It is interesting to
ask if development of the beautiful asymptoti analysis of partitions, by Hardy,
Ramanujan and others, would have been helped or impeded by su h fa ile omputation?
Ex post fa to algorithmi analysis an be used to fa ilitate independent
student dis overy of Euler's pentagonal number theorem:
Y
n1

(1

qn ) =

1
X
n=

( 1)n q (3n+1)n=2 :

Ramanujan used Ma Mahon's table of p(n) to intuit remarkable and deep

ongruen es su h as
p(5n + 4)  0 mod 5

p(7n + 5)  0 mod 7

and

p(11n + 6)  0 mod 11;

17

from data like

P (q) = 1 + q + 2 q2 + 3 q3 + 5 q4 + 7 q5 + 11 q6 + 15 q7 + 22 q8 + 30 q9
+ 42 q 10 + 56 q 11 + 77 q 12 + 101 q 13 + 135 q 14 + 176 q 15 + 231 q 16
+ 297 q 17 + 385 q 18 + 490 q 19 + 627 q 20b + 792 q 21b + 1002 q 22 + 1255 q 23 +



If introspe tion fails, we an re ognize the pentagonal numbers o urring
above in Sloane and Ploue's on-line `En y lopedia of Integer Sequen es':
www.resear h.att. om/personal/njas/sequen es/eisonline.html. Here we
see a very ne example of Mathemati s: the s ien e of patterns as is the title
of Keith Devlin's 1997 book. And mu h more may similarly be done.
8

Some on luding dis ussion

8.1 George Lako & Rafael E. Nunez

\Re ent Dis overies about the Nature of Mind.
In re ent years, there have been revolutionary advan es in ognitive
s ien e | advan es that have a profound bearing on our understanding of mathemati s.25 Perhaps the most profound of these
new insights are the following:
1. The embodiment of mind. The detailed nature of our bodies, our
brains and our everyday fun tioning in the world stru tures human
on epts and human reason. This in ludes mathemati al on epts
and mathemati al reason.
2. The ognitive un ons ious. Most thought is un ons ious | not
repressed in the Freudian sense but simply ina essible to dire t
ons ious introspe tion. We annot look dire tly at our on eptual
systems and at our low-level thought pro esses. This in ludes most
mathemati al thought.
3. Metaphori al thought. For the most part, human beings on eptualize abstra t on epts in on rete terms, using ideas and modes
of reasoning grounded in sensory-motor systems. The me hanism by
whi h the abstra t is omprehended in terms of the on ept is alled
on eptual metaphor. Mathemati al thought also makes use of on eptual metaphor, as when we on eptualize numbers as points on
a line."26
They later observe:
25 More

serious urri ular insights should ome from neuro-biology (Dehaene et al., \Sour es
of Mathemati al Thinking: Behavioral and Brain-Imaging Eviden e," S ien e, May 7, 1999).
26 From \Where Mathemati s Comes From," Basi Books, 2000, p. 5.

18

\What is parti ularly ironi about this is that it follows from the
empiri al study of numbers as a produ t of mind that it is natural
for people to believe that numbers are not a produ t of mind!"27
I nd their general mathemati al s hema persuasive but their spe i a ounting of mathemati s for ed and un onvin ing. Compare a more traditional
view whi h I also espouse:

\The pri e of metaphor is eternal vigilan e."

(Arturo Rosenblueth and Norbert Wiener28 )

8.2 Form follows fun tion

\The waves of the sea, the little ripples on the shore, the sweeping
urve of the sandy bay between the headlands, the outline of the
hills, the shape of the louds, all these are so many riddles of form,
so many problems of morphology, and all of them the physi ist an
more or less easily read and adequately solve." (D'Ar y Thompson,

\On Growth and Form" 1917)29 )

A entury after biology started to think physi ally, how will mathemati al
thought patterns hange?

\The idea that we ould make biology mathemati al, I think, perhaps is not working, but what is happening, strangely enough, is that
maybe mathemati s will be ome biologi al!" (Greg Chaitin, Interview, 2000)

Consider the metaphori al or a tual origin of the present `hot topi s`: simulated annealing (`protein folding'); geneti algorithms (`s heduling problems');
neural networks (`training omputers'); DNA omputation (`traveling salesman
problems'); and quantum omputing (`sorting algorithms').

8.3 Kuhn and Plan k

Mu h of what I have des ribed in detail or in passing involves hanging set
modes of thinking. Many profound thinkers view su h hanges as di ult:

\The issue of paradigm hoi e an never be unequivo ally settled by

logi and experiment alone.

in these matters neither proof nor error is at issue. The transfer

of allegian e from paradigm to paradigm is a onversion experien e
that annot be for ed." (Thomas Kuhn30 )
27 Lako and
28 Quoted by

Nunez, p. 81.
R. C. Leowontin in

S ien e, p. 1264, Feb 16, 2001. (The Human Genome

Issue.)
29 In Philip Ball's \The Self-Made Tapestry:
Pattern Formation in Nature,"
http://s oop. rosswinds.net/books/tapestry.html.
30 In Who got Einstein's O e?
19

and

\: : : a new s ienti truth does not triumph by onvin ing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather be ause its opponents
die and a new generation grows up that's familiar with it."
(Albert Einstein quoting Max Plan k31 )

8.4 Hersh's humanist philosophy

However hard su h paradigm shifts and whatever the out ome of these dis ourses, mathemati s is and will remain a uniquely human undertaking. Indeed
Reuben Hersh's arguments for a humanist philosophy of mathemati s, as paraphrased below, be ome more onvin ing in our setting:

1. Mathemati s is human. It is part of and ts into human ulture.

It does not mat h Frege's on ept of an abstra t, timeless, tenseless,
obje tive reality.
2. Mathemati al knowledge is fallible. As in s ien e, mathemati s an advan e by making mistakes and then orre ting or even
re- orre ting them. The \fallibilism" of mathemati s is brilliantly
argued in Lakatos' Proofs and Refutations.
3. There are dierent versions of proof or rigor. Standards of rigor
an vary depending on time, pla e, and other things. The use of
omputers in formal proofs, exemplied by the omputer-assisted
proof of the four olor theorem in 1977, is just one example of an
emerging nontraditional standard of rigor.

4. Empiri al eviden e, numeri al experimentation and probabilisti

proof all an help us de ide what to believe in mathemati s. Aris-

totelian logi isn't ne essarily always the best way of de iding.

5. Mathemati al obje ts are a spe ial variety of a so ial- ulturalhistori al obje t. Contrary to the assertions of ertain post-modern

detra tors, mathemati s annot be dismissed as merely a new form

of literature or religion. Nevertheless, many mathemati al obje ts
an be seen as shared ideas, like Moby Di k in literature, or the
Imma ulate Con eption in religion. 32

The re ognition that \quasi-intuitive" methods may be used to gain mathemati al insight an dramati ally assist in the learning and dis overy of mathemati s. Aestheti and intuitive impulses are shot through our subje t, and
honest mathemati ians will a knowledge their role.
31 From
32 From

\The Quantum Beat," by F.G. Major, Springer, 1998.

\Fresh Breezes in the Philosophy of Mathemati s,"
Monthly, August-September 1995, 589{594.

20

Ameri an Mathemati al

8.5 Santayana
\When we have before us a ne map, in whi h the line of the oast,
now ro ky, now sandy, is learly indi ated, together with the winding
of the rivers, the elevations of the land, and the distribution of the
population, we have the simultaneous suggestion of so many fa ts,
the sense of mastery over so mu h reality, that we gaze at it with delight, and need no pra ti al motive to keep us studying it, perhaps for
hours altogether. A map is not naturally thought of as an aestheti
obje t ...
This was my earliest, and still favourite, en ounter with aestheti philosophy.
It may be old fashioned and unde onstru ted but to me it rings true:

And yet, let the tints of it be a little subtle, let the lines be a little
deli ate, and the masses of the land and sea somewhat balan ed, and
we really have a beautiful thing; a thing the harm of whi h onsists
almost entirely in its meaning, but whi h nevertheless pleases us in
the same way as a pi ture or a graphi symbol might please. Give the
symbol a little intrinsi worth of form, line and olor, and it attra ts
like a magnet all the values of things it is known to symbolize. It
be omes beautiful in its expressiveness." (George Santayana33)
To avoid a usations of mawkishness, I nish by quoting Jerry Fodor34 :

\: : : it is no doubt important to attend to the eternally beautiful and

true. But it is more important not to be eaten."

8.6 A few nal observations

 Draw your own | perhaps literally


!
 While proofs are often out of rea h to students or indeed lie beyond present
mathemati s, understanding, even ertainty, is not.

Good software pa kages an make di ult on epts a essible (e.g., Mathemati a and Sket hpad).

Progress is made `one funeral at a time' (this harsher version of Plan k's
omment is sometimes attribute to Niels Bohr).




`We are Pleisto ene People' (Kieran Egan).

`You an't go home again' (Thomas Wolfe).

33 From \The Sense of Beauty,"

34 In Kieran Egan's book

1896.

Getting it Wrong from the Beginning, in press.

21

Frontpie e of William Blake's Songs of Inno en e and Experien e

(Combined (1825) edition)

22