Astrophysicist and Popular Author Mario Livio Extols Mathematics

February 25, 2009

There's no mistaking how astrophysicist Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore views mathematics. 

In an interview in the Boston Globe, Livio noted that mathematics is "somewhat special in that it has an incredible longevity." That which "was true once remains true forever," he said. "The area of the circle that was discovered by Archimedes more than 2,000 years ago is still true." Livio is the author of the newly released Is God a Mathematician? and The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number.

To exemplify "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics," Livio observed that mathematicians often formulate new branches of mathematics with absolutely no application in mind. Decades, even centuries later, he said, "those mathematics are discovered to provide precisely the type of model that physicists need to model the universe."

A relevant example in his new book is knot theory. "It's an incredible thing," Livio said, "because people for years did not deal with knots in a mathematical way; then they delivered this knot theory and they found that things like string theory, our best candidate for a theory of everything, and [also] the treatment of the way the DNA replicates, requires concepts from knot theory."

In his review of Is God a Mathematician? in the Washington Post's Book World (Feb. 8, 2009), the Post's Marc Kaufman wrote, "As explained by Livio, the history of mathematics is partly a struggle between these points of view: that math is how God (or nature) organizes the world, or it is simply a human tool to understand that world."

"Livio comes down in the middle, contending that math may well be both invented and discovered," Kaufman continued. "The author acknowledges that some readers will find his inconclusive conclusion to be unsatisfying. I didn't. Sometimes the adventure, the intellectual ride, is more important than the final destination."

Source: Boston Globe, Feb. 8, 2009.