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Michael Atiyah, mathematician quotes, Online Learning.
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Sir Michael Atiyah. (b. 1929) British-Lebanese mathematician, widely considered one of the greatest geometers of the 20th century.
Sir Michael offers the following
comments on our capacity to perceive, and its
relationship with geometry:
Our brains have been constructed in such a way
that they are extremely concerned with vision.
Vision, I understand from friends who work in
neurophysiology, uses up something like 80 or 90
percent of the cortex of the brain...
Understanding, and making sense of, the world
that we see is a very important part of our
evolution. Therefore spatial intuition or spatial
perception is an enormously powerful tool and
that is why geometry is actually such a powerful
part of mathematics - not only for things that are
obviously geometrical, but even for things that are
not. We try to put them into geometrical form
because that enables us to use our intuition. Our
intuition is our most powerful tool...
I think it is
very fundamental that the human mind has
evolved with this enormous capacity to absorb a
vast amount of information, by instantaneous
visual action, and mathematics takes that and
perfects it.
Although the Fields Medal does not have the same public recognition as the Nobel Prizes, they share a similar intellectual standing. It is restricted to one field — that of mathematics — and an age limit of 40 has become an accepted tradition. Mathematics has in the main been interpreted as pure mathematics, and this is not so unreasonable since major contributions in some applied areas can be (and have been) recognized with Nobel Prizes. A list of Fields Medallists and their contributions provides a bird's-eye view of mathematics over the past 60 years.
