This week a variety of colleges and other educational instances around New York organized the World Science Festival, right here in Manhattan, New York. We, from SuperForest, had press access and visited ‘The Mathemagician’ earlier today.
The mathemagician is a man named Arthur Benjamin who fearlessly merges the art of magic and the study of mathematics. Here is a video we made today while we were at the event.
The video has some poor quality from time to time, excuse me for that.
Let’s go on about this Arthur Benjamin. If you are a frequent SuperForest reader you may have read about him before. His TED talk is featured towards the end of this post. This video is really amazing and it also shows some of the things Benjamin showed us today. For example squaring a five digit number or telling on what day any random given date was.
I thought – and still think – that Benjamin is one of the most amazing mathematicians walking the Earth. He’s got a way of merging his profession and the other stuff he loves into one thing, and while he does that he is still teaching regular classes and conducting research. A true multi-tasker.
Since I have the aspiration to study an alike field of science I really appreciate how Benjamin tries to involve the ‘regular public’ with his field of research. Without a doubt I believe that he knows more about mathematics than most of us do, and only some of us are interested in becoming as good at it as Benjamin is. So it would be rather useless for Benjamin to start holding talks about the stuff he studies, since not a lot of people would be interested in listening to him.
Instead he sought for a tiny bit in his area of expertise that is interesting to everyone; performing mind bogglingly complex calculations from the top of his head. In his talk Bejamin showed that he looks for patterns, and that if you look carefully they are all around. And that’s what a part of mathematics is about.
So thank you Arthur Benjamin for trying to interest the general public in a complex field of science that would be put aside otherwise!
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