MATHEMATICS AS AN AESTHETIC PURSUIT K.

Viswanath There is a story that a young person at a party once stopped Einstein with Tell me, Professor, is this mathematics racket really on the level?! The story may be apocryphal but it is sure to strike a sympathetic chord in some. When a musician is totally involved with music or a painter with art, that is understood and appreciated even by people who may not know much about music or art. But when it is a question of a mathematicians total involvement in mathematics, a certain amount of skepticism seems to make its appearance. Everyone can see that mathematics is very useful in designing airplanes, building bridges or calculating the trajectories of spacecraft. The wonder and the bewilderment arise when mathematicians claim that these applications are incidental as far as they are concerned and that one of their main motivations is the pursuit of an aesthetic delight. Why is it that while it is common knowledge that music or art leads to aesthetic experience, the fact that mathematics also does so is not so well-known? One reason is that for most people the usefulness of mathematics is in itself sucient justication for its study. Other aspects become irrelevant. Another reason is that while the ne arts are concerned with form and movement which can be apprehended by the senses, mathematics deals with ideas which can only be grasped by a trained intellect and consequently its content is less accessible. A simple illustration may help to clarify the point. The physical eye can see the sun rising, but only the eye of the intellect can see the earth rotating on its

axis. Again, the physical eye can see the apple falling, but only the intellects eye can see that the moon is also falling exactly like the apple. The purpose of this article is to try and convey to the reader a feeling for this aesthetic delight of mathematics. One way to do this would be to write a serious-minded essay to describe the nature of mathematical activity, illustrate by analogy with other elds of creativity, and support the whole with quotations from great mathematicians. But there is also another and more direct method. And that is to present some simple example of mathematical creativity, make a comment or two, and leave the rest to the reader. Like showing you a bouquet of owers, drawing your attention to texture, color and arrangement and discreetly withdrawing to leave you to yourself to perceive the beauty and experience the delight. You should be able not only to appreciate the bouquet, but in a ight of imagination, see the Valley of Flowers in your minds eye. One point must be kept in mind, though. It is that mathematics is not just a body of knowledge, but an activity. To appreciate the joys of swimming one must be ready to get into the water. To appreciate mathematics one must actively involve oneself in the details of the arguments. The ne arts can be enjoyed to some extent even passively, but not so mathematics. With these preliminary remarks, let us begin the demonstration. Since this article is meant for the general reader we are going to conne ourselves to mathematical ideas learned at the school level. The be specic, we shall concentrate on the circle of ideas centering around the Pythagoras theorem. Let us make a story of it A short story of historical ction.

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One day Pythagoras was invited to a friends house for dinner. All the guests present were engaged in animated conversation, but Pythagoras was silent. His attention was caught by a design on the oor. (see Figure 1.)

Figure 1: He felt it held some strange secret. Zen philosophy tells us that while all of us may look at the same thing, what we see depends on our inner condition. (To a pickpocket, the world is full of pockets.) Pythagoras saw something which no one else did. When the guests rose for dinner, Pythagoras abruptly jumped up and rushed home to his study. Feverishly, he redrew the design and marked out eight triangles in it: (See Figure 2.)

1 2 4 5 6 7 8 3

Figure 2: The eight triangles formed one big square and two smaller ones. Clearly the areas of the smaller squares added up to the area of the big square. And together they formed a right-angled triangle where their corners touched. Could it be, he wondered, a special case of a more general result? Suppose he took an arbitrary right angled triangle and drew a square on each of its sides (See Figure 3.)

Figure 3: Would the areas of the smaller squares add up to the area of the larger square? It was a moment of creative insight, the kind of moment mathematicians live for. But it is one thing to arrive at a guess, a conjecture, in a ash of intuitive insight, and quite another to prove it. To prove it he had to establish the result, not by approximate measurements on a few arbitrarily chosen triangles, but by deducing it in logical steps from other results already proved and known to be valid. He worked feverishly into the night.

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Let us look at some proofs of the Pythagoras theorem. A common proof found in most text-books is based on the following picture. (See Figure 4.)

Figure 4: The large square is cut up into two rectangles and the proof uses theorems about congruent triangles to establish that the larger rectangle has the same area as the lower square and that the smaller rectangle has the same area as the square on the left. We will spare the reader the details, only observing that this proof is rather awkward and messy. Mathematics is a collective, and at the same time a competitive, endeavor. One mathematician may prove a remarkable theorem. But another, while appreciating the achievement, may look for a better way of getting there. and a third may be dissatised with both. The search is essentially one for beauty and elegance. We now present two more proofs of the Pythagoras Theorem both of which are more beautiful and elegant than the one given above. I am grateful to Mr. S. Srinivas Rau for drawing my attention to the rst proof below, from

Bhaskaracharyas Leelavathi, which is based on Figure 5 below:

Figure 5: The original right-angled triangle is at the bottom left-hand corner. The sides have lengths a and b while the hypotenuse has length c. The square on the hypotenuse is enclosed in a larger square as shown. To establish the Pythagoras Theorem we have to prove that a2 + b2 = c2 . this is achieved by calculating the area of the bigger square in two dierent ways and equating the results. Since the bigger square has a side of length (a + b), its area is clearly (a + b)2 = a2 + b2 + 2ab. On the other hand the bigger square is composed of the smaller square, whose area is c2 , and four triangles, each of which has area equal to half of ab. Consequently, the bigger square should have area equal to c2 + 4(ab/2) = c2 + 2ab. Equating the two results and cancelling 2ab, we see that a2 + b2 = c2 . The proof is ingenious. A beautiful example of a geometric result proved by elementary algebra.

Can anyone think of a proof more elegant than this? Perhaps not, but the proof still leaves something to be desired. It seems to pull the Pythagoras theorem out of a hat using algebraic legerdemain. Is it not possible to give a proof making the theorem geometrically obvious? E.g.: Can we nd a method of cutting up the two squares on the sides and rearranging the pieces to form the square on the hypotenuse? Yes, we can. Let us take the same picture and draw 3 more lines, as below in Figure 6, and mark some parts:

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c a 1 . b 5 2

3 6

Figure 6: It is not dicult to see that AB has length b and BC has length a. Consequently the two squares standing on AB and BC are just the two squares on sides a and b. It is clear that the four triangles marked 1,2,5, and 6 are congruent to one another. It is now obvious that by cutting up the inner square (the square on the hypotenuse) into four parts as suggested by the numbers 1,2,3, and 4 keeping the parts 3 and 4 xed and moving part 1 down to the right and part 2 down to the left to coincide with parts 6 and 5 respectively, we get the two squares. The famous theorem is reduced almost to the Montessori level! Let us get back to our story.

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Pythagoras called his students, showed them his theorem and asked them to come up with extensions and generalizations. Their responses were varied and illustrative of the role of imagination in Mathematics. (Mathematics requires 11

the use of both hemispheres of the brain. Is that a surprise?) One student said Why squares? I nd that the theorem holds for equilateral triangles or even semi-circles constructed on the sides.

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Figure 7: That is interesting at rst sight, said Pythagoras But when you look a little more closely, you see that your observation is true merely because the areas you consider are proportional to the areas of the squares. So it is not really an extension, but an exercise. Another student said, I have found an extension of the theorem to three dimensions. But for that, I have rst to reformulate the theorem as a theorem about rectangles as follows. The square on the diagonal of a rectangle is the sum of the squares on the two sides of the rectangle. Then I look at a rectangular box in space and assert that the square on the main diagonal is the sum of the squares on the three sides of the box.

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. . . . . . . a . . . . . . d ................... . .. .. . . .............................c....................... ... . ..... .. .... b ..... .... . .... ... .... ... .... .. ... .

a2 + b2 + c2 = d2

Figure 8: Very interesting, said Pythagoras, for it gives a formula for calculating the length of main diagonal given the lengths of the sides. A formula which may become an axiom one day. But for the present I must note that it does not say very much more than my theorem, as it can be immediately deduced using my theorem twice. But let me ask, is your observation the only way of generalizing the theorem to three dimensions? What can be the analogue of a right-angled triangle in space? Well, said the student, since you can think of a right-angled triangle as a piece cut away from a corner formed by two perpendicular lines, you could perhaps take three mutually perpendicular lines meeting at a point to form a corner of a box, and cut away a part. Pythagoras nodded: That is very good. You will then get a tetrahedron like this.(See Figure 9.)

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A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .O . .................................C ... ... ... .... .... B

Figure 9: The student was by now excited. Yes, and there should be a relation connecting the areas of the faces. Perhaps the sum of the squares of the areas of the three faces around the corner will equal the square of the area of the fourth face! He paused and hesitated a little. Or should it be cubes of the areas? That is very good, said Pythagoras, If you can prove a theorem along those lines, it would be a beautiful generalization. And it should not be dicult to settle it if we had a formula for the area of a triangle in terms of its sides. I will leave you to work on it. Pythagoras turned to another student and asked What have you got? Not much yet, said the student. I am trying to generalize the theorem to arbitrary triangles. I can see that if the angle C opposite the side of length c is obtuse, we should have a2 + b2 < c2 and if C is acute we should have a2 + b2 > c2 .

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B c a C b a+ b2 c2 B A

B c a C b a+ b2 = c2 A

b a2 + b2 c2

Figure 10: I need to nd a formula for the dierence. Should be a multiple of the cosine of C, said Pythagoras thoughtfully. Very interesting. Continue. Then he turned to one whom he considered his brightest student, though somewhat of a maverick. And you? Why are you silent? The student looked up from his work. I have been trying to construct examples of right angled triangles whose sides can be measured as integer multiples of a unit length, he said. So far I have got 32 + 42 = 52 and 72 + 242 = 252 . So the basic question I am trying to tackle is. what are the integer solutions of x2 + y 2 = z 2 ?

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Pythagoras looked at him for a long moment. At last he said You may have something there. I rather think that the kind of question you have raised will hold the attention of mathematicians for centuries to come.

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Mathematics has is hills and valleys, its peaks and passes, Einstein might have replied, not to mention the smouldering volcanoes. But yes, it is absolutely on the level.

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