NUMB3RS
It is pretty good weather in Tokyo today. You would want to go on a picnic somewhere on such a day. Today I will write about an interesting book, although it has nothing to do with picnics.
Several months ago, someone’s blog article, whose I don’t remember exactly, introduced a Japanese edition of a book. The title of the book is “NUMB3RS.” Wikipedia says that it was made into a television drama in the United States in 2005 and gained popularity among millions of people.
When I read the article, the book looked fascinating because I have never read such a book that conveys concretely the practicability and efficiency of mathematics in the real world. So, I bought the original edition of the book, not the Japanese one, and I have been reading it. As you might know, the book as well as the drama depicts some criminal cases and two brothers who succeed in solving those cases with some applied mathematical methods. The older brother is an FBI investigator, and the younger one is a mathematician.
I like mathematics, and indeed the book is quite interesting. When I was a junior high school student, someone asked a math teacher a question like “What is mathematics useful for?” I don’t remember exactly what he answered, but do remember that he didn’t answer it very well. I suppose that one of the answers is what the book tells us. Mathematics is invisible in the real world because it is abstract by its very nature. However, in light of the fact that some mathematical methods help us solve the cases through criminal profiling and investigation, it is surely of much use in a wide range of fields, in particular behind what we see in daily life.