CAMBODIA NEEDS BRAINY, NOT CORRUPT PEOPLE

A portrait of S K Monoha in 2000.

Written by S K MONOHA of Cambodia, France

Let's talk about figures:

The eternal language of numbers is reborn as a form of communication that people all over the world can use and ,increasingly, must use.

Brilliance with numbers is a curious thing, Paul Erdos, a Hungarian who died in 1996, used to travel the world and stop briefly at the offices and homes of fellow mathematicians. " My brain is open," he would announce as, with uncanny intuition, he suggested a problem that,without realising it, his host was already half-way to solving. Together they would find the solution.

In a discipline-wide joke, grateful mathematicians still use " Erdos numbers" to indicate how close they were to contact with the great man : " Erdos 1" describes his co-authors, "Erdos 2" indicates their co-authors,and so on . And in all seriousness,the fruits of Erdos's 83 year life include more than 1,500 jointly authored publications,and a network that extends via his collaborations not into most areas of mathematics but into many other fields physics,biology,linguistics and more.

With his determinations to overcome all the difficulties posed by immigration authorities or language (gestures and formulas were enough,if he and his hosts shared little vocabulary), the Hungarian epitomised many things about his subject.More than most other sorts of knowledge,mathematics has always transcended the limits of time and space.The genius of ancient Greek geometry not only stands the test of time (Pythagoras's theorem is as valid now as when it was first proved) ; its discoveries can suddenly find new applications in the 21 st century.

And in an age of e-communications,continent-hopping scholars ( not usually as eccentric as Erdos), and journals whose authors and readers come from every corner of the earth,mathematics is coming into its own as a sort of global dialogue in which anybody can take part and whose fruits are not just beneficial, but indispensable,in just about every area of science.

In years past,people with a gift for numbers often overcame vast odds to find an outlet for their genuis. Srinivasa Ramanujan was a humble cleck in British Indiawhen, in 1912,he began sending theorems to cambridge professors. Just one recipient saw the work's value and invited Ramanujan to England.

The internet gives today's ramanujans a better chance. But in any case,by comparison with the arts,doing well at maths was always much less dependent on cultural or economic factors. A talenled number spinner doesn't need to be nurtured y visits to art galleries or to opera,or access to a parental library.Nor are the rules of algebra governed by social conventions; a gawky 14 year old who clams up in interviews can still do well.
And pure mathematics, at least,needs no fancy facilities like particle accelerators or wind tunnels. Sometimes a pen and paper is enough. Many a researcher has returned from an international conference with a napkin or beer-mat covered in jotting from a spontaneous and convivial late-night collaboration.

Admittedly,there is less of a distinction these days between pure maths and the applied sort; that is one of the consequences of a world where all sorts of knowledge seem to spread and fuse in unpredictable ways. For example, the kind of theoretical maths that would terrify a lay-man has become an indispensable key to understanding the way that living things behave. Anything that grows and disseminates from single celled organisms to malignant tumours, from rainforests to the pigments that form stripes or spots in the animal kingdom can be moulded with the latest computational tools. At a time when the volume of data about every form of life is vast and crying out to be processed, " some kinds of pure maths are remarkably useful for biology," says Philip Maini,a mathematician who divides his time between Oxford, China, Australia and American campuses.

To be continued....