
How I Learned the Art of Math [Excerpt]
Mathematician Ken Ono describes how an inspiring mentor helped him redefine his relationship with numbers in this excerpt from his new book, written with mathematics writer Amir Aczel
Amir D. Aczel (1950-2015) studied physics and mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley. He also held a Ph.D. in statistics. Aczel has written a dozen popular books about mathematics and physics, including the international bestseller Fermat's Last Theorem, as well as Mystery of the Aleph, Entanglement, and Present at the Creation: The Story of CERN and the Large Hadron Collider. Aczel was a research fellow at the Center for the History of Science at Boston University and a Guggenheim Fellow.
Mathematician Ken Ono describes how an inspiring mentor helped him redefine his relationship with numbers in this excerpt from his new book, written with mathematics writer Amir Aczel
A few years ago, celebrated British physicist Stephen Hawking was widely reported in the press to have placed a provocative public bet that the LHC (along with all particle accelerators that preceded it) would never find the Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle” believed responsible for having imbued massive particles with their mass when the universe was very young.His pronouncement caused a stir in the global physics community, and the Scottish physicist Peter Higgs, whose name had gotten attached to the hypothetical particle (Higgs had done some work in the 1960s, as had several other physicists, paving the way for the theoretical existence of the mass-imparting boson) took the challenge personally, complained about Hawking, and later lamented that to answer Hawking’s challenge would have been "like criticizing the late Princess Diana."In fact, informal polls of physicists over the last decade have shown that an overwhelming majority believed that the existence of the Higgs was a foregone conclusion and that all that was needed was simply to run the LHC long enough: the Higgs would eventually show up...
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