New forms of mathematics are helping to create remarkable new images on our cinema screens. Powerful forms also underlie everyday life and events. But because the mathematics cannot be seen by the general public, its importance is ignored.
There was a vigorous defence of the importance of mathematics to everyday life at the American Association meeting currently under way in Washington DC. Mathematicians attempted to help the audience understand how the results of mathematical computations were all around us.
The most obvious example, computerised animated filmmaking, was presented by Dr Tony de Rose, senior scientist at Pixar Animation Studios, the company which produced Toy Story 1 and 2 and A Bug's Life.
Animators wanted to produce better images, but the mathematics available to them was not powerful enough to produce realistic surfaces and eliminate unnecessary lines. New forms of mathematics were developed to improve the production of these animated characters, however, building on existing formulae.
"Now virtually all of the characters we are building are using the new mathematics," Dr de Rose said. The puppy Buster, in Toy Story 2, had no fewer than four million individual hairs to help it look more realistic on screen.
"The more powerful mathematics gets, the more invisible it becomes," said Dr Keith Devlin of St Mary's College of California. "Its very power is the problem, that invisible universe in which it exists."
Yet mathematics enables the results of elections to be predicted, helps to land spacecraft on Mars, and enables us to model climate or human behaviour.
Students struggling with secondary school maths often argue that the maths they do has no significance for everyday life, said Prof Lenore Blum of Carnegie Mellon University, who agreed that to a degree they were correct.
Schools routinely teach 2,000-year-old Euclidean geometry. Perhaps schools should add more modern mathematical forms which could easily be added to the existing curriculum, she said.
