Timothy Gowers: The Importance of Mathematics (Part 1)

Oh wait, I was thinking 50 years for some reason. Hmm, oh well.

Four Color Theorem. 1976, I think.

he will be one of my lecturers soon, looking forward to it after seeing this (well i was anyway, but you get the idea).

thanks for uploading.

The actual introduction didn't last more than 1 minute.. do you call this a long introduction?

well not everyone does, besides the room is full of journalists... so his speech

thats my dad!

I don't know about you but I only find false humility, like from George W. Bush, irritating. True humility coming from this man I have a ton of patience for. It's part of the whole absent minded genius thing. Some girls find it rather cute.

I disagree. Just because the question is moronic, doesn't mean it should be ignored because mathematicians get asked it every day. I'm not talking about high school dropout who doesn't have the patience for "crashing bores" but college students in majors (who presumably already have the patience for this kind of man) that only have to take Calculus II and no more like business, economics, even computer science.

One of the things I learned about making models in mathematics is that certain assumptions are often necessary. However, these assumptions must be reasonable. May I ask by what reasoning you make an assumption that I am a college drop out?
The question is rhetorical, you don't know and you can't know....and you happen to be wrong too. It might have been correct by mere chance but it would have been no more reasonable if it were, which it isn't.

He's not defending arithmetic, he's defending the highly abstract mathematics that everybody in that room is working on.