Читать книгу The Number Mysteries: A Mathematical Odyssey through Everyday Life - Marcus Sautoy du - Страница 28

The great seventeenth-century scientist Galileo Galilei once wrote:

The universe cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word. Without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.

This chapter presents the A–Z of nature’s weird and wonderful shapes: from the six-pointed snowflake to the spiral of DNA, from the radial symmetry of a diamond to the complex shape of a leaf. Why are bubbles perfectly spherical? How does the body make such hugely complex shapes like the human lung? What shape is our universe? Mathematics is at the heart of understanding how and why nature makes such a variety of shapes, and it also gives us the power to create new shapes as well as the ability to say when there are no more shapes to be discovered.

It isn’t only mathematicians who are interested in shapes: architects, engineers, scientists and artists all want to understand how nature’s shapes work. They all rely on the mathematics of geometry. The Ancient Greek philosopher Plato put above his door a sign declaring: ‘Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here.’ In this chapter I want to give you a passport to Plato’s home, to the mathematical world of shapes. And at the end I’ll reveal another mathematical puzzle, one whose solution is worth another million dollars.