If you want to understand the nature of elegance, you could do worse than having coffee with a theoretical mathematician.
I asked my friend, Ramin, to explain the idea of “beauty” in mathematics. Simplicity is a big part of it, he said. An expression is elegant when not a single element can be added or removed without screwing up its functionality.
But that’s no enough. To be truly breathtaking an expression needs to be unexpected. It has to knock our heads together and change how we see things. The works of Isaac Newton, Watson and Crick, and George Carlin come to mind. Carlin wasn’t a STEM guy but the same principles apply to comedy, music and do-it-yourself plumbing projects.
By the sixth grade Ramin had his sights set on chemistry but thanks to his success in math competitions in Iran, his future was hijacked. He won a Silver Medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad in Moscow in 1992 and later was admitted to John Hopkins. He went to do postdoctoral training at Princeton.
Ramin believes calculus is one of the great conceptual leaps of mankind. As a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he teaches from the same textbook he used as an adolescent and that pleases him. He warns we shouldn’t be lulled in complacency about calculus — its integrity is being reduced to a “bag of tricks.”
Ramin revealed his age as 40.999999999999999999 on a recent Facebook post but he’s seems at least .999999999 younger than that in person.
