An interview for the Western District Office of Education in Seoul. The questions all came from parents of young children concerned about their children’s education. Lacking expertise, I usually try to say as little as possible about educational issues of a direct sort. But here, I may have made at least a few mistakes and expressed ignorant opinions.
A public lecture and discussion with physicist Kwon Park on the relationship between scientific thinking and mathematical thinking, sponsored by the Korea Institute for Advanced Study and the KAOS (Knowledge Awake On Stage) Foundation.
This is the first part of a YouTube broadcast known as ‘Unreal Science’. (I presume the following portions are linked.) I hesitated quite a bit before participating in this and I’m sure many serious scientists will (rightly) regard it as frivolous. But I know that the intentions of the channel providers are serious. I’ve always admired the work of Matt Parker in the UK, who manages to combine mathematics outreach with stand-up comedy. It’s somewhat reminiscent of Zen Buddhist methodology, whereby the master does absurd things sometimes to relax the mind and body of the student, allowing the difficult lessons to seep in. I will never be able to imitate Parker or a Zen master, but this was a small attempt at something vaguely similar, mostly thanks to the aid of my kind hosts. The broadcast went from 11PM to 1AM. I was really impressed by the regular viewers of this show, who numbered around 9000 at the highest point in the night, listening to mathematics.
Preview of a lecture for the JTBC TV programme ‘Differential Class’, in which I try to explain mathematics to TV personalities. (I’m not sure how to access the lecture itself.) I should say I was extremely impressed by the participants. The recording lasted over 6 hours and covered much more material than the programme. During this time they all remained engaged, asked good questions, and really wanted to learn. The production team was itself remarkably serious about achieving harmony between education and entertainment.
A series of eight lectures for Naver:
A series of 17 lectures for the Korean Educational Broadcasting System on ‘Mathematical Moments’ Just the first two are currently online. Believe it or not, towards the end of the series, I tried to derive the wave equation for the vibrating string. (Perhaps those parts were the least successful.)
In keeping with my new duties (or using them as an excuse), from now on, I’ve decide to regularly and shamelessly post my public activities in order to improve a bit their accessibility and reach. Of course feel free to provide critical feedback by facebook or email. I will start with my latest column for Hankyeoreh, drawing parallels between atomism and the germ theory of infection. I will follow with a series of posts on activities this summer.
Here is a link to my Hankyeoreh column for this month. It started from a question about the mathematics of weather forecast and ended with a discussion about a claim that Descartes is the ‘Father of Modern Meteorology’ in this paper. It is indeed interesting that Descartes decided to include meteorology among the three scientific expositions that followed his famous ‘Discourse on Method.’ (The others were Geometry and Optics.) He explains on the first page of the paper that he was motivated by the reverence inspired by heavenly phenomena as well as by their complexity, which he wished to explain in mundane scientific terms.
Here is the July instalment of my column for Hankyeoreh newspaper. I describe the influence of developments in science on the painting ‘Judith Slaying Holofernes’ by Artemisia Gentileschi. You may enjoy figuring out what the influence is, if you don’t know already. (You can eventually look here.) I’ve put this into the context of the 17th century, which was classified as a ‘Century of Crisis’ by the historians Hugh Trevor-Roper and Eric Hobsbawm. See also the relatively recent book by Geoffrey Parker, which tries to find roots for the crisis in climate change. Among other sources of unrest, the century was plagued by systematic recurrence of the bubonic plague, killing more than a million people in the Kingdom of Naples, for example. It’s believed that Artemisia died together with a whole generation of Neapolitan artists during this outbreak. On the other hand, this was also the century of the scientific revolution, starting from Galileo and perhaps coming to a completion with Newton. Reading European history often gives me a sense of parallel universes, because the great leaps forward of civilisation and culture give little indication of the socio-political turmoil surrounding them, at least until I read quite carefully.
This is the text (in Korean) of a lecture I gave in the summer of 2018 at an educational talkshow in Seoul called Sitting Around Doing Science. It took place on a stage in the cafe/pub Bunker 1. I gave a brief personal account of encounters with mathematicians from different parts of the world and indulged in some reflections on the cultural background that must have influenced their intellectual formation. Particular attention is paid to the remarkable Soviet school of mathematics of the 20th century and its fate following the events of 1991. It was interesting to discuss societal aspects of mathematics with non-mathematicians, many of whom stayed for the three-hour duration.
Some interesting statistics:
Just in 1990, about 1000 mathematicians emigrated out of the Soviet Union.
At the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berkeley in 1986, about half of the 80 or so speakers were from the Soviet Union. At the International Congress in Hyderabad in 2010, there were 5 mathematicians from Russian Institutions among the 170 speakers.
Mathematics with Random People on the Street 
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