The tightness of the racereminded me of the incredible "butterfly phenomenon" of chaos theory.Here we have experienced the phenomenon. At the dawn of mathematics, notcheswere cut in a stick. From start to finish,
thousands and thousands of peopleand machines were involved in the process. How does one check the programmingor the physical operation of the computer? By doing the calculation over again.The simplest idea in the entire corpus of abstract
mathematics relates to theintuitive mathematics of the real world in an exceedingly complex way. Thevalue of a large corporation is not determined by counting, among other things,the number of light bulbs in its factories and offices. Consider the manner ofcounting the population of the United States, recently the subject oflitigation. The ultimate choice is not mathematical: It is political and legal.In the process of writing the book, we copied it from two "reliable"sources. The first value
cited came from Hardy and Wright's famous AnIntroduction to the
theory of Numbers. Whatever it was, the exacteight-figure value of p(10^9) was of little importance to us. The secondvalue mentioned ( . . . 534) is now cited by the Web site author as the correctone. The pursuit of mathematics depends on a high level of often-unacknowledgedtrust and faith. The law was not able to anticipate or deal with all theconsequences of an unavoidable amount of
fuzzy math. Called"The Seven Circles," the story was by Manil Suri. It is also deeplyperceptive about the complexities of the human experience, from the pettysquabbles of neighbors to the wildly romantic fantasies of teenagers to thememories of a man facing his own mortality." U.S. publication of the novelis scheduled for January 2001.What about Suri themathematician? He was born in Bombay in 1959 and received a BS in mathematicsfrom the University of Bombay in 1979. He went to Carnegie Mellon for graduatestudy, earning his PhD in mathematics in 1983 under the supervision of DickMacCamy. Since then he has been associated with the University of MarylandBaltimore County, becoming a full professor in 1994 at the age of 35. Theauthor of some 50 research papers, he is an expert on the solution of partialdifferential equations by the finite-element method.
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