Life's patterns

Natural History, May, 2007 by Robert Anderson

Through mathematics one can enter a purely abstract world--one that I recently rediscovered while reading The Number Devil, by the German author Hans Magnus Enzensberger, to my children. With wonderful illustrations by Rotraut Susanne Berner, the book takes readers into the surreal dreams of a troubled math student who is visited nightly by an irritable teacher with a pointing cane, red skin, and horns. Together, student and teacher venture into territory rarely explored by the schools, which confine themselves to the materials covered by standardized tests. The Devil unveils a rich world in which the numbers form curious patterns, almost as if they were alive.

The big surprise is that even the most arcane realities of abstract mathematics often end up offering deep insights into the natural world. In 1960 the physicist Eugene P. Wigner published his classic paper, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" (www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/Math Drama/reading/Wigner.html). Going beyond his title, Wigner makes the point that "the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it." Einstein's famous formula, E=[mc.sup.2], is just one example of how the natural world can be neatly reduced to equations.

There are many sites that show some of the innovative ways that mathematics can help illuminate the living world; to see my review of some of the best of them, please go to our Natural History Web site (www.naturalhistorymag. corn), click "Online Extras," then "Web Links," and finally "May 2007" to find "nature.net."

ROBERT ANDERSON is a freelance science writer living in Los Angeles.