I'm very happy and excite to be here
I should mention
I'm recording it and I plan on putting it on youtube
because what I'm going to say
I don't want to just whisper it to you, I want to shout it to the whole world
Popular Science is largely
underrated
on one hand
and also, underdeveloped both in quality and in quantity
I want
you to take away the message that we have to do
much more popular science
and that it is essential
I'm going to start
with a real story
so
8 years ago, I joined a football team
(so I play football)
it was the start
the team was created the year I joined it. It was a family team
with some Italian people. The name of the team was tifosis.
so I guess I'm also partly Italian.
It was a family team
it was not very structured and the team was not very good
if we switch to the next slide
this is the ranking at the end of the year
tifosis is here.
at the bottom. We had 1 win.
This is a miracle!
There's no physical explanation of that!
was that an own goal?
no...
what's even more troubling is this number
this is the goal difference
there were 18 eighteen games. We ended with -196.
if you divide 196 by 18, it's more than 10 goals a game...
We usually lost about 10-0.
it was played on sunday mornings
I usually sleep.
so we had to wake up every sunday morning
to run all the way
and lose 10-0.
the atmosphere in the team...
at first it was "yeah, we're having fun"
but after 2 or 3 games like that, it was horrible. There were internal conflicts
people wanted to leave the team
what's extraordinary...
most people left the team
what's extraordinary is that I didn't. My friends and I didn't. We stayed in the team
even though it was terrible.
and the next year
we did better
we were still last, but we did better
we ended with -70. it was more like 5 or 6-0.
and then we kept on and the next year,
we got even better
and we ended 7th of the league
and then the next year we got even better
and we ended up
3rd among 10 teams
and we actually went up division
and the question I want to ask you is
why?
why, when it was so hard,
why did we keep going?
and mathematics is said to be very hard
but I kept on going in mathematics even though it was very hard. Why?
my answer to this is PASSION.
I'm passionated by football
I play even though I lose games
because I just like to be up there on the pitch and touching the ball
that didn't happen a lot but the few times it did
similarly
mathematics needs that
mathematics and science we need passion
we need passion to keep on going
even though it's complicated and we don't understand anything
I'm going to use a quote by Albert Einstein. He famously said that
you see the importance of passion
very often when I have a mathematical problem that I cannot solve
I would spend hours and hours.
I would stay late because I want to solve it, because I'm very
interested by the problem
and then I would go home
I still don't have the solution, but I keep on
thinking about it
when I go to sleep I'm still thinking about it
and in the next morning
I have a solution
and it's wrong but I keep on going. I keep on going.
after a week or two weeks sometimes, I get the answer.
but you need to be passionate
to always think about it. It has to drive you crazy
to really understand the problems
and that's the message I want to get here
how can we add more passion
I think football
is a great example to show how passion is communicated
there's an extraordinary passion in football
can you name a few football players
beckham, kaka, messi
can you name mathematicians?
Stephen Hawking
Bernouilli
Who's that mathematician who played for Brazil?
Socrates I guess...
I've heard Galilei
Socrates and Galilei can be considered mathematicians but they've been dead for 2,000 years
how can you inspire people with people who are dead?
football has these stars, they walk on the street, they play in stadiums and on television
where as the mathematicians we usually talk about are dead. It's much less inspiring.
yet there are great mathematicians out there
doing amazing research today
and we don't talk enough about them.
so that's sort of the message. Let's steal ideas from football.
now that I've put passion
on a very high level
i think if we have passion everything will follow. Passion is the most important thing.
it has consequences.
so I've been writing on Science4All
Science4All.org is my website. I write articles on this.
and I've had a lot of feedbacks
i've had a lot of good feedbacks
i've had a lot of bad feedbacks
what I want to mention here are the feedbacks which were meant to be good
but I don't find them good at all
so let's start with this one
sometimes people say:
it's very interesting what you talk about
but it's a shame you had to dumb it down.
and we don't see the details of mathematics
i really hate this sort of reaction
There's something much more important
than being
accurate and right
it's the whole idea of the theory which matters
it's the reasonings and the stories
also
when we're trying to be technical
mathematics in school is (not always but often) too technical
we have too much focus on the details
we're missing out on the big picture
the details leave out the big picture
imagine we were walking in Bandung
and I want to know Bandung. Bandung is sort of a
mathematical proof
we would like to know it
what would be done in school is you'd
have a teacher guiding you
through the city
but if you have a guide who walks you through the city
you might see some of the things and you might remember one or two things but you will never know the city
you need to wander by yourself
in the city
you need to
explore the different areas
to really know the city
and
the first thing you want to know is to have the big picture
the map of the city. You don't want to have the picture of a particular street
you want to have the big picture
and that's why popular science is essential to get this big picture
another remark
that I get is that
science is great because
it gives facts
that also I don't like
I really don't like such remarks
they're meant to be good...
but I don't really like these remarks and the reason why I don't
is because... the fact that a fact is a fact is in fact very boring!
vibratory
if you want to communicate passion,
what do I care if a fact is a fact or not
there's a much bigger story behind that
and that's what's amazing
if you've heard of
the proof of Fermat's last theorem
Fermat's last theorem, I don't care if it's right or wrong. I don't give a damn
but the story of
Fermat's last theorem
the fact that there was a mathematician three hundred years ago
who wrote a theorem
and he wrote in the margin that there was not enough space to put the proof.
And that mathematicians for 300 years
have struggled on this
little simple proof
it's amazing
and even the story of Andrew Wiles
who proved Fermat's last theorem
he spent 6, 7 years alone working
on his own on this problem
and he got the answer
and it was wrong
imagine you spend 6 years on one single problem
you give it to the world and every body applauds you
and it turns out you were wrong
what's even more amazing is that 1 year after that.
he had the solution
and fixed the problem
and when he talked about it
it's just so inspiring
it's right here. I know we've talked about emotions
about learning through emotions, and it's really about that.
and we should work more on that
an example of something that's completely wrong.
Einstein saying he has no talent
i don't believe him
i think it's wrong
but the story behind this
is just amazing
what I want to take
uh... so the last thing
the last sort of remarks
that I get
and that always...
i'm not very happy when I read that
people would say: yes, your blog is amazing, kids are going to love it.
I don't know
if you see what's wrong with that
what about the adults?
yes! what about the adults?
as Jan [Visser] put it in his slide
the kid phase is here, like that
the other phase is like that
you want all of these people to learn too
in fact it's even more important
i think that maths and science MUST not be
associated with schools and kids only
i think we all agree with that
the consequence
of
just always associating maths and school
grown-ups often tell me: Math? cool! I used to do it!
i used to love it. I used to. That's the problem: "I used to".
why don't you do mathematics anymore?
there's so much
amazing things you still have to discover about mathematics. Why is it over for you?
and the consequence on kids is that
kids, they grow up, they look at their parents, and they want to be like their parents
and their parents don't do mathematics anymore
so what do they say?
they say: I want to do real things
like my parents
and that's awful
that, right here, is a huge hurdle to the development of science
I want to talk a little bit
about popularizing
science
I want to talk about other things
than what I do. There's the museum of mathematics which just opened.
I think it's awesome. I haven't been there yet. But I really want to go. First thing I'll do when I get in New York!
here is something amazing too
in the UK, the government financed.
the
idea of bringing
mathematics in workplaces
by the idea
of "math champions"
just little mathematics but in workplaces
you have movies and books which are amazing
and these are 3 youtube channels. You really should check them out. Minute Physics, Numberphile, Veritasium
there are many others I'm not mentioning here
which are also very good
so this is my website
on my website there are links to all the youtube channels
my website is Science4All.org
the motto is "Make it simple. Make it cool."
i think it's essential
for the building of
the scientific mind.
