Problems with the History textbooks and education | Web Is the New Art

A must-see movie for educators: The Professor’s Beloved Equation

Paul talks about The Book. The Book has all the theorems of Mathematics. Theorems can be proved in a lot of different ways but in the Book, there is only one proof. And it is the one that is the clearest proof; the one that gives the most insight: the most aesthetic proof. It’s what he calls the Book Proof. And sometimes when there is a problem and when somebody solves it and the proof is not so beautiful, then he’ll say, “Well okay, let’s look for the Book Proof. Let’s try to find the Book Proof.” And this is the sense of Mathematics that the Book is there. The theorems have an existence of their own. And what we are doing is we are just trying to uncover; we are trying to read the pages of the Book. We don’t create Mathematics. What we do is, we read the pages of the Book. We discover the pages of the Book.

So when he goes from university to university and when he talks about problems, he asks everybody to try to solve these problems, it doesn’t matter who solves the problem. It really doesn’t matter to him because all of us are in the same venture. We are all just trying to uncover the pages. And sometimes we succeed; sometimes we find these beautiful theorems.

- Attributed to Paul Erdös in N Is A Number

Maths can be very interesting: this was a major revelation. It was the only reason why I felt I shouldn’t leave the theatre without taking Takashi Koizumi’s autograph, after the screening of his movie, The Professor’s Beloved Equation, at the Mumbai Film Festival last year. When I had first seen Koizumi earlier that evening, I had made fun of him. He looked so much like Akira Kurosawa that I couldn’t stop telling people, “Look, Kurosawa is here!” Little did I know about his background – the fact that he had assisted Kurosawa in his later movies.

Last night after watching a documentary on Paul Erdös, it has become clear to me that Mathematics has a lot in common with Humanities. I lost interest in Maths during my final years at school since I hated memorising anything. The way we were taught made me to avoid school and later college. I always sought creative freedom and space for my imagination. Only in the past few years, I developed my own method of learning and I have started to see Maths as a liberating experience.

As a writer, you are always looking for ideas and solutions to meet the challenge of the writer’s life. Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival are two books that I have identified with the most. One more author that I turned towards earlier this year was Albert Einstein. His Ideas and Opinions is indispensable to those who are in the business of thinking different.

Updated: Dec 5, ’11

“History—a true, warts-and-all inquiry into the past—is a nuisance. So it should be no surprise that the ‘happily-ever-after’ pablum that passes as history in schools is, in the end, a lot like advertising. There is, however, a notable difference: Advertising is focused on the future, targeting our ever-increasing quest for the new. So while advertising aims to increase desire, this history (or pseudo-history) hopes to kill it. By decontextualizing events, by erasing competing arguments, by boring studentsto death, pseudo-history inspires nothing but a distaste for history. Therein lies a great irony, which we discuss elsewhere: History has become the least imaginative and most hated subjects taught in school precisely because it is so important.”