Of course none of the answers were ever quite satisfactory.įrenkel ultimately enrolled at a less exalted school, the Institute of Oil and Gas, but he found ways to attend lectures at MGU. “It’s the set of all points on the plane equidistant from a given point.” Next he had to define a triangle and then a line.
“A circle is the set of points on the plane equidistant from a given point,” Frenkel said. As soon as he began to answer, his inquisitor interrupted to demand that he define a circle. Frenkel was given a geometry problem about a circle inscribed in a triangle. But those with Jewish names or heritage were turned away through a system of rigged oral exams. Officially, discrimination didn’t exist all students were eligible to apply. The Soviet brand of anti-Semitism in that era had an especially cruel twist to it. In 1984, at age 16, he applied to the mathematics program at Moscow State University (known as MGU), even though he had been warned he would not be admitted because of his “nationality”: Jewish. Frenkel grew up in an industrial city two hours from Moscow where a family friend-a teacher at a local college-encouraged and coached him in mathematics. ) He expands on this theme in Love and Math, a book that blends personal memoir with a tutorial introduction to some important ideas on the frontiers of modern mathematics.įirst the memoir part. (The Wilson and the Frenkel essays were reprinted in Notices of the American Mathematical Society and are available online. “It’s about concepts and ideas that empower us to describe reality and figure out how the world really works,” he wrote. Frenkel countered that math is indeed a useful tool, and more. The champion who stepped forward from the ranks of mathematicians to contest this claim was not an elder statesman like Wilson but a Russian American mathematician in his 40s: Edward Frenkel of the University of California, Berkeley. Wilson published an essay in the Wall Street Journal arguing that knowledge of mathematics is not necessary or even particularly helpful in most of the sciences.
Last April the distinguished biologist Edward O. LOVE AND MATH: The Heart of Hidden Reality.
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