Overview
- a truly interdisciplinary volume of general interest on mathematical culture, education, media, cinema and theatre showing the strong links between mathematics and culture
- intended for mathematicians and for a more general audience, for teachers and for researchers, for students in a large variety of topics
- Shows how mathematics can be a vibrant and intriguing cultural subject
- Deals with many films and plays having mathematical settings or themes. Several contributions on popular films such as "A Beautiful Mind", "The Bank", "Moebius", "Cube", "The Mirror Has Two Faces", "Enigma" etc.
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
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Keywords
- Prime
- STATISTICA
- Topology
- applications
- art
- calculus
- cinema
- geometry
- images
- mathematics
- proof
- theatre
- theorem
About this book
It is not true that mathematics has never been able to arouse people's interest. At least, this is our feeling as mathematicians when we meet the general public to explain what we are dealing with in our work, what is the usefulness of mathematics and how it becomes possible to catch its harmony and beauty.
Also the cinema changed its attitude on the matter, and some screenplays started to show mathematicians engaged in their work while some recent theatrical pieces have a mathematician as a main character.
These considerations stimulated some of us to organize the review Mathematics and Theatre, which offered to a general audience the opportunity to attend performances and, at the same time, to hear something about prime numbers, Galois’ theory, or simply about the relationship between science, mathematics and power at Napoleon's times.
This volume, which has its origin in the activities performed in Bologna in 2004, is dedicated to all those who are curious about mathematics, but also more generally about theatre, cinema, literature, arts and science.
Thanks to the DVD one can relive various events through the voices and the images of the participants.
Reviews
From the reviews:
“Volume contains the proceedings of the eponymous conference Mathematics and Culture in Europe held in Bologna … . content of the DVD is elegantly presented and easy to navigate, and it works both for PCs and Macs, which is a big plus. … having collected in a single volume descriptions, explanations, and references … on several recent and not-so-recent movies and plays about mathematics and mathematicians is definitely helpful, and would justify buying this book to anybody interested in the relationships between mathematics and art.” (Marco Abate, The Mathematical Intelligencer, Vol. 31 (4), December, 2009)About the authors
Mirella Manaresi is professor of geometry at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Bologna. Her main research field is algebraic geometry, but, since some years, she is also involved in activities to promote the interest for mathematics of the general public.
She was editor, with M. Emmer, of the volume Mathematics, art, technology, cinema (Springer Italia, 2002 and Springer 2003, respectively in the Italian and in the extended English edition), and between 2002 and 2005 she has been responsible for a European project, from which this volume takes origin.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Mathematics and Culture in Europe
Book Subtitle: Mathematics in Art, Technology, Cinema, and Theatre
Editors: M. Manaresi
Publisher: Springer Berlin, Heidelberg
eBook Packages: Mathematics and Statistics, Mathematics and Statistics (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-540-71963-2Published: 18 September 2007
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: X, 405
Additional Information: Original Italian edition published by Springer Milano, 2005