Beauty of Math Video

How to See Math's Beauty

Hugh Howards - Professor of Mathematics

Math is all around you, in so many things that you already love; you just don't realize that it's math. Math is not just adding and multiplying; that's arithmetic. Math is searching for patterns and explaining why things are true. Something as simple as soap bubbles contain the very answer as to why math is beautiful. Soap bubbles solve a math problem; they're round, elastic and have air trapped inside them. Like a stretched rubber band, they want to shrink and be small, but they can't because of the air trapped inside them, so they find the least possible surface area to enclose that air, which is a sphere. Math is everywhere in nature. Fibonacci's numbers are revealed in the shape of a pinecone, the seeds of a sunflower, the petals of a rose and the shell of a nautilus. If you play chess or checkers or, more likely these days, fantasy football, you're using math because you're looking for patterns, predicting what your opponent is going to do. You don't realize it when you're untangling an extension cord, but you're using knot theory to figure out how to untangle the 'bad' DNA strands from the good ones. Math is already beautiful; you just have to recognize it all around you.

Howards, an expert in knot theory, won the University's Reid-Doyle Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 2004 and the Distinguished Teaching Award of the Southeastern Section of the Mathematical Association of America in 2009.