This time, in January, we went to Keith Devlin's talk at Cubberly Auditorium at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, USA, Earth, Solar System, Milky Way, M3 universe, Universe. We were so late that out of the four revolutions he was going to talk about, we missed one revolution already.
He talked about Fibonacci who was the son of an Italian merchant who sometimes traveled to Asia and told Fibonacci about the new Hindu-Arabic number system which used the base 10 system (it was still the 12th century, when people in Europe commonly used the base 5 Roman system). In 1202, Fibonacci wrote Liber Abacci (book of calculations). He said, "Fibonacci uses two or three pages to explain what would be explained to a kid in kindergarden in one sentence." He talked about Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat as they tried different approaches to solve the problem of the points. The problem of points is: Two players are playing a game which has 5 rounds. When one player is leading 2 to 1 then the game has to stop. How will the pot (the prize for the winner) be divided? Read "The Unfinished Game" by Keith Devlin to find out! This problem was one of the early problems of probability.
Keith Devlin said, "Until now mathematics was developed by physics. Now, we expect it to be developed by biology." After the lecture was over, I put on my rain boots and splashed through the watery parts of the road we had to go on. Just as we were leaving, I called Mummy and I stayed on the phone until we came home.
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