there is no permanent place in
this world for ugly mathematics.
G. H. Hardy
The most romantic people
Mathematics are considered to be the most logical and sublime form of abstract reflections. As mathematics build the fundamentals of most of today's sciences, it goes without saying that there are a huge number of things which are based on any sort of mathematical model. Mobile phones, computers, cars, air planes.... All of these things are build on more or less complex algorithms which describe their specific behaviour. For these things, you can find probably more theorems and formulae as there are stars in the sky. Behind every new invention always stands a team of engineers, mathematicians and other researchers who analysed their project in every detail through a mathematical analysis. But there is one thing, which is as old as the humanity and still almost untouched by Mathematics. It's something everybody is going to encounter whether he wants or not and which will strongly influence his decisions in life and as a result play a significant part in his life. I'm speaking of feelings and especially love. Only very few mathematician have ever dared to describe with a theorem or a formula how it feels when you love someone. So how is it possible to describe something where so many poets have miserably failed before us because they simply lacked of words, with such simple things as numbers and formulae? Could a single formula describe what entire books filled with poems and romantic stories were unable to tell us? Can the most rational thing on earth describe the most irrational feeling we ever felt? Well it actually is possible to make a small mathematical approach to it. Whether it is the right approach is another discussion. But one thing is for sure: writing love poems is rather traditional and unless you are a great poet not really impressive. If you really want to come up with something exciting and new, why not a scientific undeniable proof? Nothing can be more convincing than a mathematical demonstration, which is undoubtedly true even for the centuries to come. Surely candlelight dinners and solitary moonwalks are very romantic moments and shouldn't be neglected. But sometimes those people that came up with the most foolish ideas ended up eventually as the greatest geniuses of our time... When Galileo said that the earth was turning around the sun, he was threatened with torture and the death sentence. Wernher von Braun was considered as a fool when he said that men were going to fly to the moon. There are many more such examples. Nobody took them serious, but all their visions and ideas came out to be true.
