A Collector of Math and Physics Surprises | Hacker News Reader

A Collector of Math and Physics Surprises

quantamagazine.org

179 pointshaltingproblem19 comments

I was first introduced to Tadashi Tokieda on Numberphile, he's incredibly charismatic. Here's[0] a playlist of videos in which he appears in.

[0] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt5AfwLFPxWI9eDSJREzp1wvO...

I read this hoping to find a neat collection of math and physics surprises. I was surprised to read a biographical interview that only drops a couple of hints about the things he finds nifty.

The title says "collector", not "collection".

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tadashi+tokieda

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt5AfwLFPxWI9eDSJREzp...

When I was at university he gave a seminar for professors and postgraduates entitled "Proving theorems with physics" where he used principles like the conservation of momentum or absence of bulk charge to prove a range of otherwise difficult theorems.

It was a really fun and interesting talk, the guy is extremely smart and charismatic.

If you haven't known, there's this book called The mathematical mechanic by Mark Levi that has topics as you described.

While watching some of his videos (and of YT channel "Numberphile") I discovered that the man also speaks fluent French (enough to give a public lecture in mathematics), as well as his Japanese + English. Pretty damn impressive.

His CV really is something to behold.

The article mentions that French was his first foreign language. He picked up Russian to read his first calculus book, then English to do an Oxford maths degree. And you're unlikely to be a doctoral student in philology and know only one foreign language, so he had undoubtedly learned at least one other language between the French and the Russian. People don't always realise just how scary serious students of linguistics are.

The article mentions that English is his seventh language!

And there's a charming series of quotes about his journey from being a linguist to a mathematician - "The book was in Russian, and I didn’t know Russian, but a young linguist is not afraid to pick up another language."

...

"Oxford was the only place that would allow you to rush through an undergraduate program in two years. I didn’t know English, but a linguist is not afraid to pick up another language."

"And so that’s what you do. You just look around. And sometimes you feel tired, or you feel dizzy, or you feel preoccupied by other things, and you cannot do this. But you’re not always tired and you’re not always preoccupied. In those moments, you can find lots of wonderful things."

I really like this man's approach to life ... all the amazing discoveries waiting around us.

There are lots of things to discover, leading to the same glee we had in childhood. With or without 'use' doesn't matter. One I remember best is rubbing a nylon comb to 'charge it up' up, and holding it next to a thin stream of water falling from a tap.

I once pulled my Dad into that -- made a Mobius strip and said 'it only has one side!' He said 'oh no'. I gave him a pencil and watched his face as he drew the line.

Yes, curiosity about the world around you is infectious. I watched a few videos of Takada and they are really intriguing.

There is a very nice, very accessible series of topology talks he did here : https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTBqohhFNBE_09L0i-lf3fYXF...

Very early on he covers Möbius Strips and Klein Bottles (what most amateur mathematicians want to hear when they go to a topology video) and later on he touches on how Brouwer’s Fixed Point theorem relates to Nash Equilibriums

I’ve tried to learn topology several times and was bogged down in definitions of open and closed (and of course “clopen” sets) every time. His lectures were very refreshing.

(Long time lurker, I lost my login and created a new one just to share this)

Thanks for the links. Topology seems so fascinating, someday I will dive into it to pick up concepts.

He’s a fantastic math personality...

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