I Want to Be a Mathematician: A conversation with Paul Halmos - trailer

The 44-minute film contains a rare interview with Paul Halmos by Peter Renz, revealing his thoughts on mathematics, and how to teach it and write about it. Five bonus features include comments by
mathematicians Robert Bekes, David Eisenbud, Jean Pedersen, and Donald Sarason about their
experiences with Halmos. Interviews with Halmos by Don Albers and Halmos's own writings are included as PDF documents.

www.maa.org
www.zalafilms.com

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Paul Halmos
• math
• mathematics
• documentary
• peter renz
• r. l. moore
• santa clara university
• donald sarason
• jean pederson
• bob bekes
• david eisenbud
• don albers

[Cagebreaker21]

This maths trailer has length pi.

[jdbrown371]

For God's sake don't look it up in a book, looking it up in a book is giving up... I love that!

[chocolatemilkyum]

FUCK MATH

[marcpiggott]

@coolman9999uk And furthermore, what if a new problem comes along which isn't directly addressed in some textbook? You won't have the ability to come up with a solution unless you understand the mechanics.

[marcpiggott]

@coolman9999uk I agree to an extent, in your day to day maybe you don't need to have a full appreciation of ZFC, but to solve PDEs like say the black scholes PDE you have to know about Hilbert spaces, because the formulation of the problem requires them, and more importantly, because you won't understand the decent numerical methods for solving it. You can always follow a prescription in a text book without actually understanding why the method works, but where's the fun in that?

[coolman9999uk]

@marcpiggott I mean a useless set of knowledge to have in industry, e.g. as far as I know, a quant never has to use ZFC to understand anything of their models. I certainly never need it. Perhaps there's some other industry that I'm not aware of. Also, I don't mean useless in a disparaging way, although I know many people do.

[marcpiggott]

@coolman9999uk So set theory and Hilbert spaces are useless? Now I've heard it all.

[serrod1981]

Great eye! :-)

[braydenbeautiful]

"looking it up in a book is giving up"

As someone who has, and still is, going through university level math (cal. 1-3), he is so right. Spending 2 hours to work out the math for yourself, rather than finding a neat little summery of it in a textbook, is the best way to learn math. True, some times you're forced to yield to your own mental limitations, but you're missing out on math as an enterprise if you're always looking for others to think for you.

[coolman9999uk]

@ectomorphman Yep, I'm almost exclusively using software. For the vast majority of useful applications, the differential equations are insoluble by analytical means and numerical methods are your only option. It's not point and click though, it's coding! If there is a statistical element to your work, it's difficult to avoid. The main hideouts for applied mathematicians are banks but I'm in the pharmaceutical industry. I consider applied as anything useful (so no set theory, hilbert spaces...).

[mastronomical]

@darkunorthodox big bang theory!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!