Beauty and Truth: Photographer Talks About “Mathematicians”

Ellen Gilbert

The faces are old, young, and in-between and the poses are varied, but the expressions on the faces of the 92 subjects of photographer Mariana Cook’s new book, Mathematicians, are consistently ones of engaged contentment. In the personal essays accompanying each photograph, these “ultimate authorities” on the truth, as Ms. Cook describes them, write about the profound satisfactions that come with their chosen field.

They talk about them as well. “I consider myself very lucky,” said Fields Medal winner Andrei Okounkov last week at the Princeton Public Library, where Mathematicians was the focus of the season’s first “Thinking Allowed” presentation, offered in collaboration with the book’s publisher, Princeton University Press. Mr. Kounkov, one of several of Ms. Cook’s subjects who joined the photographer at the event, teaches representation theory, algebraic geometry, and mathematical physics at Princeton University. The Fields Medal is considered the highest honor a mathematician under the age of 40 can receive.

“I’m very happy,” Mr. Okounkov told the audience. “I get to work with some of the smartest people in the world. Math is in much better shape than many other aspects of the world today. I feel a great sense of pride and a great humbleness.”

In his essay, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences Professor Sathamangalam Rangaiyengar Srinivasa Varadhan, who surely enjoys the distinction of having the longest name in the book, described the mathematician’s feeling upon finding a solution to a problem as a “sense of satisfaction” that “cannot be described in words!”

Beauty?

Another Princeton University subject present at the event was Ingrid Chantal Daubechies, the William R. Kenan Professor of Mathematics and Applied and Computation Mathematics. “‘Will I have beauty in my life?’” she recalled a graduate student once asking her. “‘Will I be enchanted, will I be surprised?’”

Ms. Daubechies reported reassuring the young woman that doing mathematics elicits “the same feeling as looking at something beautiful.” Mathematics, she observed, “isn’t just uncannily good at explaining things; it’s the only thing we have to explain things.”

“Mathematicians are exceptional,” wrote Ms. Cook in her preface to the book, which is subtitled “An Outer View of the Inner World.” Mathematicians “may look like the rest of us,” she wrote, “but they are not the same.” In her presentation last week, Ms. Cook, who was Ansel Adams’s last student, described encounters with several of her subjects, noting that despite their real brilliance, they were “not at all patronizing; just a pleasure.”

Reporting on her meeting with one of the book’s youngest mathematicians, Iranian-born Maryam Mirzakhani, who teaches ergodic theory and Teichmüller theory at Princeton, Ms. Cook noted how the kinship among mathematicians was sometimes revealed in their comments to her. In an effort to describe what she does, Ms. Mirzkhani reached for a coffee mug, and began pointing to its handle. “Curtis McMullen did the same exact thing,” Ms. Cook told her. “He was my teacher,” Ms. Kirzakhani replied.

Patterns

William Alfred Massey, who teaches applied probability, stochastic processes, and queuing theory as Princeton University’s Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Operations Research and Financial Engineering, made the library audience do a double-take when he posed the question, “how many people can memorize 100 numbers?” There were, not surprisingly, no takers. Displaying the “power of patterns,” he asked the question a different way: “How many people can count to 100?”

Princeton math professors Edward Nelson and John Horton Conway (“quite a character,” according to Ms. Cook) also appear in the book. The inspiration for photographing Mr. Nelson with his pipe, Ms. Cook said, came from a student who told her that “he gave us lots of quizzes because he liked to go outside to smoke his pipe.” The first person to be photographed for the book, Mr. Nelson gave Ms. Cook suggestions for many of the mathematicians she eventually photographed.

Other subjects in the book include Max Planck Institute for Mathematics Director Friedrich E. Hirzebruch, Berkeley Professor and Fields Medal winner Richard Ewen Borcherds, Oxford University Professor Emeritus Bryan John Birch, Florida State University professor Eriko Hironaka, Columbia University topology and knot theory specialist Joan S. Birman, and Institute for Advanced Study professors Peter Clive Sarnak and Avi Wigderson.

Robert Clifford Gunning, a professor of mathematics and former Dean of the Faculty at Princeton, is both a subject in the book and the author of its introduction, where he writes of the hope “that this book might be a way of indicating that the pursuit of mathematics is a continuing activity that attracts a wide variety of delightful, individualistic, and devoted men and women.”

In her review of Mathematicians, Sylvia Nasar, who wrote the book A Beautiful Mind about another of Ms. Cook’s subjects, John Forbes Nash, Jr., observed that “The startling contrast between lined faces and lively minds suggests that the passionate pursuit of mathematics is an ideal formula for aging gracefully, even joyfully.”

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