STROGATZ: THE PLEASURE OF THE

Steven Strogatz. The pleasure of x. A

guided tour of mathematics, from one to
infinity. Madrid, Taurus, 2013. 400 pages

The book by the professor at Cornell

University, New York, Steven Strogatz,
which has just been published in Spanish by
the Taurus label, The pleasure of x , is
already in Asunción bookstores.
Strogatz speaks of a pleasure that almost all
of us are deprived of in childhood, and of
which we are generally deprived forever.
Of a pleasure that is discovered at a very
early age, that is usually lost almost as soon
as it is discovered and whose loss is usually
irremediable.
In childhood we enjoy for the first (and,
with few exceptions, for the last) time the
amazement at the grace and transparency,
the simplicity and brilliance of the only
power that is at the same time absolute and
gentle. In childhood we received, and
already in childhood they take away from
us, the gift of smiling at the wonder of
illumination and the fierce subtle traps, of
the difficult perfection and supreme
elegance of mathematics.
As fantasy also fertilizes them to procreate
exquisite monstrous lineages of aporias and
paradoxes, later, sometimes, visiting the
home of some member of this singular
delicious and cursed offspring, we find
again the lost ideal love of childhood, now
in its area of most explicit humor and most
notorious madness. And we see that failed
passion with the nostalgia of what we have
only desired, and not experienced, already
as children expelled from Eden, and with
the nostalgia of what is irretrievable,
because mathematics requires, like all great
vices, a degree of devotion to the one that
made us incapable.
We use mathematical mechanisms every
day. We apply probability calculation and
statistical analysis to the way we think and
act. We synthesize in numbers (and words)
the central features of countless cases of the
same type. We suspect infinity when
around the corner an endless perspective is
projected before us or when a high roof
makes space disappear into the distance or
when the sky appears enormous and
unexpected because we look up without
thinking. But we ignore how much of us
and our lives is made of mathematics.
Renegade mathematicians without knowing
it, we have forgotten what we knew as
children or what we were born to know.
Those who, ironically, are designated to
teach it to us, are responsible for depriving
us of this science. Between the walls of the
classroom, they mutate, become
pathogenic, allergenic and cause phobias
and even traumas, and, powerless to inspire
desire, they lose their beauty. Thus, we go
through life and die without recovering that
which remains only for a select few. And
yet, as the unknown driving force of our
mind, of our decisions and ideas and deep
secret knowledge, they remain at our side
and, although we no longer know how to
recognize them, they never abandon us.
Obvious but hieroglyphic, essential but
misunderstood, universal but minority, we
lose them in primary or high school. It is
rare that the mathematician inside one
survives the classes and the teachers, who
turn the light of this region, which is the
clearest and most diaphanous of thought,
into complete darkness. It is not always
their fault: the methodological burden of
repeating without understanding is enough
to achieve the horrible miracle on its own.
We ask nothing so as not to lengthen a class
that is already unbearable. The mass of
empty data is made arbitrary thanks to the
Olympian disdain for meaning, which is the
only thing on which teachers and students,
filled with the same rush to leave the
classroom, are in total agreement.
Countless generations of beings almost
dead from yawning, hyperventilating beings
and aching jaws; of beings traumatized by
visions of blackboards with fatal scribbles;
of beings condemned to flee for life with
disgust and boredom from everything that
seems like an equation, demonstrate the
uselessness of this technique that continues
to sow from the classrooms, on a planetary
scale, a pandemic of mathematical
ignorance.
And yet, in each generation that emerges
from the Treblinka and the mental
Auschwitz, from the mathematicide camps
in which we lose all ability to understand
mathematics, there are a few who retain the
fascination for the harmonious and
immutable structure that they have intuited
under those same lessons that for others
bury the prodigy.
And those who retain the pleasure of , we
knew and know that intelligence has its
delusions, its dangers, its luminous joys, its
own curious form of excess and barbarism,
its hermetic orgies, its obsessive addictions,
and that it has them for the simple reason
that it is wild and outrageously funny.
Steven Strogatz, in The Pleasure of X, aims
to return to mathematics what was
accessible and magical for us before being
obscured by what is called education. His
deliberate desire to be entertaining and
light-hearted tarnishes the text with that
unpleasant forced condescension typical of
the pretentiously didactic tone of certain
popular literature, which is an annoying
stylistic misfortune. Despite this, it is worth
it (for those who feel it) to suffer the
discomfort in the face of the bad taste that
this professor of Applied Mathematics at
Cornell University demonstrates in this
regard, and that he shares with so many
scientific communicators, in exchange for
his skill and experience in this guided tour
that one ends up satisfied and grateful for
such an enlightening reading, which
provides so much information about the
unique relationships of mathematics with
literature and philosophy, with art in
general and with medicine, among other
things, and that It has the delicious quality
of always giving away some unexpected
revelation in each chapter.An excellent
teacher, who, alas, could have saved many
of us a thousand school problems and long
hours of mortal and unforgivable boredom,
Strogatz recovers for readers the
intelligibility and logic of everything that in
his subject had lost the interesting virtue of
be thinkable The pleasure of x , published
in Spanish by Taurus, is a generous
introduction to the deepest concepts of
mathematics. The first part, "Numbers", is
dedicated to them (the numbers) as
symbols; the second, "Relationships", to
algebra, to the way in which the
combinations and relationships between
numbers express the complexity of the
world; the third, "Forms", to the concepts of
space and form, logic and demonstration;
the fourth, "Change", to calculation, to the
continuous change of reality; the fifth,
"Data", to statistics, networks and
probability; and the last, "Borders", to the
realities located between the known and the
unknown. Strogatz's work not only presents
mathematical certainties, but also enigmas;
He returns them to us with all their peculiar
lucidity, but also with all their abysses and
mysteries. With this book, the essential
time has come to finally pass this vital and
enigmatic pending subject with honors.

Montserrat Alvarez