Science in Culture Quantifying the Free Oscillations of a Spheri- Cally Symmetrical Earth Model, and Show Ț -Fetishism Looking As If He’S Recovering from a Lobotomy

book reviews

Hooke’s law (otherwise known as earth- quakes). Then they set out methods for Science in culture quantifying the free oscillations of a spheri- cally symmetrical Earth model, and show Ț -fetishism looking as if he’s recovering from a lobotomy. how these oscillations can be classified into Ț : A Darren Aronofsky film Cohen is convinced that the (almost random) groups that are affected by particular regions Artisan Entertainment: 1998 digit sequence of Ț holds the key to of the Earth’s interior. Finally, they show how Graham Farmelo understanding the pattern of daily changes in the ellipticity and other forms of lateral variabil- New York stock market, which he monitors ity can be handled. Ț is, I believe, the first film to be named obsessively during his forays into the real world. Although the book’s main emphasis is on after a mathematical symbol. This is a “Mathematics is the language of nature,” the normal modes, asymptotic methods are sign of the times: mathematics is seeping into narrator repeatedly intones, but Cohen does not given to explain the principal features of popular culture, notably through books that have bind himself to the rigours of scientific analysis, body and surface waves. Most applications of made Andrew Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s last and so, as his mentor warns him, he is in danger seismology, including many of our discover- theorem and the life of the number theorist Paul of practising mere numerology. ies about the Earth’s internal structure, have Erdös the stuff of recreational chatter. As Max closes in on his solution, he is pursued been based on such asymptotic methods. No sooner have the educational Jeremiahs by Wall Street hustlers intent on financial The book’s presentation is authoritative, convinced us that mathematical standards in domination and by a Kabbalah sect trying to and graduate students and their supervisors schools are both low and falling, at least in the unlock the secrets behind their ancient holy texts. for years to come will turn with gratitude to West, than the subject becomes a big-business So we are in strange territory here, in the nether Theoretical Global Seismologyto learn how to leisure activity among people who cheerfully world of impure mathematics, tenuously handle such complications as the effect of admit they cannot cope with long division. connected to the real world via a 24-carat high initial deviatoric stress on the body Hollywood discovered the new appeal of eccentric and a host of gargoyles. You can’t help force equivalent of an earthquake, or to mathematics two years ago in the box-office hit feeling sorry for Cohen’s neighbour: would you interpret an accelerometer record at low Good Will Hunting, director Gus Van Sant’s like to live next to someone whose work involves frequencies when there can be significant engaging tale of a delinquent mathematical genius. washing a human brain down his bathroom sink? contributions from changes in elevation Set in Boston, the Athens of America, this was a Aronofsky does not aim to give us a (free air) and the overall gravity field. surprisingly unsentimental portrayal of academic mathematics lesson, so he does not consider in Dahlen and Tromp’s book shows us that life in which mathematicians were for once played any detail what has made the number Ț such a seismology is a highly specialized science in as more-or-less normal people and not as unkempt rewarding mystery for mathematicians over the that it focuses just on the internally generat- sociopaths with foreign accents as thick as treacle. past 4,000 years. But he does gently try to interest ed motions of our planet. But, on the other Ț is more challenging fare, cinematically and us in the possibility of understanding the patterns hand, because we can study the Earth year mathematically. Like Good Will Hunting, it we see around us. In one scene, Cohen looks out after year and century after century, seismol- features a mathematician, but is — superficially at across a beach and we are invited to consider with ogy also forces us to generalize our under- least — more concerned with how mathematics him what might underlie the pattern of waves on standing of linear wave propagation. This might be applied to the world. However, Ț is not the shore, of sea shells and of the light we do in order to quantify the effects of another crowd-pleasing blockbuster from the shimmering on the ocean. Ț Ț inhomogeneity, high initial internal stress dream factory, but an accessible art-house film, Such quiescent moments are rare; is in the and discontinuities across a fault. Our produced from the independent sector. It first main a sharply cut thriller, suffused with a new understanding is then available for shot to notoriety after winning a Directing Award bleakness intensified by grainy black-and-white other fields, for example waves in layered at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. photography and the menacing electronic semiconductors. Director and co-writer Darren Aronofsky sets soundtrack. The script is taut, the production The theoretical seismology in this book is his film in some of the more unsavoury parts of inventive and the direction striking. It all amounts not merely an intellectual achievement of a New York. The action revolves around the to the most imaginative début for a writer–director very high order, it is driven by the need to misanthropic number theorist Max Cohen since Quentin Tarantino gave us Reservoir Dogs. understand our planet and will be the basis of (played by Sean Gullette), a certifiable Ț-fetishist But Ț is not really about mathematics. Like applied seismology and other practical stud- and, of course, a genius (why do film-makers seem Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo, which is less ies of wave generation and propagation for to think that all mathematicians are brilliant?). He concerned with science than with the inability of decades to come. works alone at home in his seedy little apartment, a scientist to cope with the moral consequences Paul G. Richards is at the Lamont-Doherty Earth an Alfred Brendel of the computer keyboard, of his work, Aronofsky’s film uses his theme Observatory, Palisades, New York 10964, USA. of mathematics-inspired hokum as a Ț-fetishist Max Cohen (Sean Gullette). backdrop for something different — an off-beat

UE analysis of paranoia.

TIQ Now that mathematics is ‘cool’, its ideas have A new currency in the arts. For me, this is both W LIB welcome and surprising. When I was an THE

T undergraduate, I attended an entertaining lecture

MA on Principia Mathematica, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s mind-stretching account of the foundations of mathematics. But if Russell and Whitehead were so smart, our professor mused, why didn’t they have the wit to sell the film rights? In 1973, that remark brought the house down. It wouldn’t surprise me now if the laugh turns out to be on us. Graham Farmelo is at the Science Museum, South Kensington, London SW7 2DD, UK.