CHAPTER 2

WHAT MATHEMATICS IS FOR

We've now established the uncontroversial idea that nature is

full of patterns. But what do we want to do with them? One
thing we can do is sit back and admire them. Communing
with nature does all of us good: it reminds us of what we are.
Painting pictures, sculpting sculptures, and writing poems are
valid and important ways to express our feelings about the
world and about ourselves. The entrepreneur's instinct is to
exploit the natural world. The engineer's instinct is to change
it. The scientist's instinct is to try to understand it-to work
out what's really going on. The mathematician's instinct is to
structure that process of understanding by seeking generali-
ties that cut across the obvious subdivisions. There is a little
of all these instincts in all of us, and there is both good and
bad in each instinct.
I want to show you what the mathematical instinct has
done for human understanding, but first I want to touch upon
the role of mathematics in human culture. Before you buy
something, you usually have a fairly clear idea of what you
want to do with it. If it is a freezer, then of course you want it
to preserve food, but your thoughts go well beyond that. How
much food will you need to store? Where will the freezer have
to fit? It is not always a matter of utility; you may be thinking

II
14 NATURE'S NUMBERS

of buying a painting, You still ask yourself where you are

going to put it, and whether the aesthetic appeal is worth the
asking price. It is the same with mathematics-and any other
intellectual worldview, be it scientific, political, or religious.
Before you buy something, it is wise to decide what you want
it for.
So what do we want to get out of mathematics?
Each of nature's patterns is a puzzle, nearly always a deep
one. Mathematics is brilliant at helping us to solve puzzles. It
is a more or less systematic way of digging out the rules and
structures that lie behind some observed pattern or regularity,
and then using those rules and structures to explain what's
going on. Indeed, mathematics has developed alongside our
understanding of nature, each reinforcing the other. I've men-
tioned Kepler's analysis of snowflakes, but his most famous
discovery is the shape of planetary orbits. By performing a
mathematical analysis of astronomical observations made by
the contemporary Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, Kepler
was eventually driven to the conclusion that planets move in
ellipses. The ellipse is an oval curve that was much studied
by the ancient Greek geometers, but the ancient astronomers
had preferred to use circles, or systems of circles, to describe
orbits, so Kepler's scheme was a radical one at that time.
People interpret new discoveries in terms of what is
important to them. The message astronomers received when
they heard about Kepler's new idea was that neglected ideas
from Greek geometry could help them solve the puzzle of pre-
dicting planetary motion. It took very little imagination for
them to see that Kepler had made a huge step forward. All
sorts of astronomical phenomena, such as eclipses, meteor
showers, and comets, might yield to the same kind of mathe-
 WHAT MATHEMATiCS is FOR IS

matics. The message to mathematicians was quite different. It

was that ellipses are really interesting curves. It took very lit-
tle imagination for them to see that a general theory of curves
would be even more interesting. Mathematicians could take
the geometric rules that lead to ellipses and modify them to
see what other kinds of curve resulted.
Similarly, when Isaac Newton made the epic discovery
that the motion of an object is described by a mathematical
relation between the forces that act on the body and the accel-
eration it experiences, mathematicians and physicists learned
quite different lessons. However, before I can tell you what
these lessons were I need to explain about acceleration.
Acceleration is a subtle concept: it is not a fundamental quan-
tity, such as length or mass; it is a rate of change. In fact, it is a
"second order" rate of change-that is, a rate of change of a
rate of change. The velocity of a body-the speed with which
it moves in a given direction-is just a rate of change: it is the
rate at which the body's distance from some chosen point
changes. If a car moves at a steady speed of sixty miles per
hour, its distance from its starting point changes by sixty
miles every hour. Acceleration is the rate of change of veloc-
ity. If the car's velocity increases from sixty miles per hour to
sixty-five miles per hour, it has accelerated by a definite
amount. That amount depends not only on the initial and
final speeds, but on how quickly the change takes place. If it
takes an hour for the car to increase its speed by five miles per
hour, the acceleration is very small; if it takes only ten sec-
onds, the acceleration is much greater.
I don't want to go into the measurement of accelerations.
My point here is more general: that acceleration is a rate of
change of a rate of change. You can work out distances with a
.6 NATURE'S NUMBERS

tape measure, but it is far harder to work out a rate of change

of a rate of change of distance. This is why it took humanity a
long time, and the genius of a Newton, to discover the law of
motion. If the pattern had been an obvious feature of dis-
tances, we would have pinned motion down a lot earlier in
our history.
In order to handle questions about rates of change, New-
ton-and independently the German mathematician Gottfried
Leibniz-invented a new branch of mathematics, the calcu-
lus. It changed the face of the Earth-literally and metaphori-
cally. But, again, the ideas sparked by this discovery were dif-
ferent for different people. The physicists went off looking for
other laws of nature that could explain natural phenomena in
terms of rates of change. They found them by the bucketful-
heat, sound, light, fluid dynamics, elasticity, electricity, mag-
netism. The most esoteric modern theories of fundamental
particles still use the same general kind of mathematics,
though the interpretation-and to some extent the implicit
worldview-is different. Be that as it may, the mathemati-
cians found a totally different set of questions to ask. First of
all, they spent a long time grappling with what "rate of
change" really means. In order to work out the velocity of a
moving object, you must measure where it is, find out where
it moves to a very short interval of time later, and divide the
distance moved by the time elapsed. However, if the body is
accelerating, the result depends on the interval of time you
use. Both the mathematicians and the physicists had the same
intuition about how to deal with this problem: the interval of
time you use should be as small as possible. Everything
would be wonderful if you could just use an interval of zero,
but unfortunately that won't work, because both the distance
 WHAT MATHEMATiCS is FOR 17

traveled and the time elapsed will be zero, and a rate of

change of DID is meaningless. The main problem with nonzero
intervals is that whichever one you choose, there is always a
smaller one that you could use instead to get a more accurate
answer. What you would really like is to use the smallest pos-
sible nonzero interval of time-but there is no such thing,
because given any nonzero number, the number half that size
is also nonzero. Everything would work out fine if the interval
could be made infinitely small-"infinitesimal." Unfortu-
nately, there are difficult logical paradoxes associated with
the idea of an infinitesimal; in particular, if we restrict our-
selves to numbers in the usual sense of the word, there is no
such thing. So for about two hundred years, humanity was in
a very curious position as regards the calculus. The physicists
were using it, with great success, to understand nature and to
predict the way nature behaves; the mathematicians were
worrying about what it really meant and how best to set it up
so that it worked as a sound mathematical theory; and the
philosophers were arguing that it was all nonsense. Every-
thing got resolved eventually, but you can still find strong dif-
ferences in attitude.
The story of calculus brings out two of the main things that
mathematics is for: providing tools that let scientists calculate
what nature is doing, and providing new questions for mathe-
maticians to sort out to their own satisfaction. These are the
external and internal aspects of mathematics, often referred to
as applied and pure mathematics (I dislike both adjectives,
and I dislike the implied separation even more). It might
appear in this case that the physicists set the agenda: if the
methods of calculus seem to be working, what does it matter
why they work? You will hear the same sentiments expressed
18 NATURE'S NUMBERS

today by people who pride themselves on being pragmatists. I

have no difficulty with the proposition that in many respects
they are right. Engineers designing a bridge are entitled to use
standard mathematical methods even if they don't know the
detailed and often esoteric reasoning that justifies these meth-
ods. But I, for one, would feel uncomfortable driving across
that bridge if I was aware that nobody knew what justified
those methods. So, on a cultural level, it pays to have some
people who worry about pragmatic methods and try to find
out what really makes them tick. And that's one of the jobs
that mathematicians do. They enjoy it, and the rest of human-
ity benefits from various kinds of spin-off, as we'll see.
In the short term, it made very little difference whether
mathematicians were satisfied about the logical soundness of
the calculus. But in the long run the new ideas that mathe-
maticians got by worrying about these internal difficulties
turned out to be very useful indeed to the outside world. In
Newton's time, it was impossible to predict just what those
uses would be, but I think you could have predicted, even
then, that uses would arise. One of the strangest features of
the relationship between mathematics and the "real world,"
but also one of the strongest, is that good mathematics, what-
ever its source, eventually turns out to be useful. There are all
sorts of theories why this should be so, ranging from the
structure of the human mind to the idea that the universe is
somehow built from little bits of mathematics. My feeling is
that the answer is probably quite simple: mathematics is the
science of patterns, and nature exploits just about every pat-
tern that there is. I admit that I find it much harder to offer a
convincing reason for nature to behave in this manner. Maybe
the question is back to front: maybe the point is that creatures
 WHAT MATHEMATiCS is FOR 19

able to ask that kind of question can evolve only in a universe

with that kind of structure .•
Whatever the reasons, mathematics definitely is a useful
way to think about nature. What do we want it to tell us about
the patterns we observe? There are many answers. We want to
understand how they happen; to understand why they hap-
pen, which is different; to organize the underlying patterns
and regularities in the most satisfying way; to predict how
nature will behave; to control nature for our own ends; and to
make practical use of what we have learned about our world.
Mathematics helps us to do all these things, and often it is
indispensable.
For example, consider the spiral form of a snail shell. How
the snail makes its shell is largely a matter of chemistry and
genetics. Without going into fine points, the snail's genes
include recipes for making particular chemicals and instruc-
tions for where they should go. Here mathematics lets us do
the molecular bookkeeping that makes sense of the different
chemical reactions that go on; it describes the atomic struc-
ture of the molecules used in shells, it describes the strength
and rigidity of shell material as compared to the weakness
and pliability of the snail's body, and so on. Indeed, without
mathematics we would never have convinced ourselves that
matter really is made from atoms, or have worked out how the
atoms are arranged. The discovery of genes-and later of the
molecular structure of DNA, the genetic material-relied
heavily on the existence of mathematical clues. The monk
Gregor Mendel noticed tidy numerical relationships in how

'This explanation. and others. are discussed in The Collapse of Chaos. by

Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart (New York: Viking. 1994).
20 NATURE'S NUMBERS

the proportions of plants with different characters, such as

seed color, changed when the plants were crossbred. This led
to the basic idea of genetics-that within every organism is
some cryptic combination of factors that determines many
features of its body plan, and that these factors are somehow
shuffled and recombined when passing from parents to off-
spring. Many different pieces of mathematics were involved
in the discovery that DNA has the celebrated double-helical
structure. They were as simple as Chargaff's rules: the obser-
vation by the Austrian-born biochemist Erwin Chargaff that
the four bases of the DNA molecule occur in related propor-
tions; and they are as subtle as the laws of diffraction, which
were used to deduce molecular structure from X-ray pictures
of DNA crystals.
The question of why snails have spiral shells has a very
different character. It can be asked in several contexts-in the
short-term context of biological development, say, or the long-
term context of evolution. The main mathematical feature of
the developmental story is the general shape of the spiral.
Basically, the developmental story is about the geometry of a
creature that behaves in much the same way all the time, but
keeps getting bigger. Imagine a tiny animal, with a tiny proto-
shell attached to it. Then the animal starts to grow. It can
grow most easily in the direction along which the open rim of
the shell points, because the shell gets in its way if it tries to
grow in any other direction. But, having grown a bit, it needs
to extend its shell as well, for self-protection. So, of course,
the shell grows an extra ring of material around its rim. As
this process continues, the animal is getting bigger, so the size
of the rim grows. The simplest result is a conical shell, such
as you find on a limpet. But if the whole system starts with a
 WHAT MATHEMATiCS is FOR 21

bit of a twist, as is quite likely, then the growing edge of the

shell rotates slowly as well as expanding, and it rotates in an
off-centered manner. The result is a cone that twists in an
ever-expanding spiral. We can use mathematics to relate the
resulting geometry to all the different variables-such as
growth rate and eccentricity of growth-that are involved.
If, instead, we seek an evolutionary explanation, then we
might focus more on the strength of the shell, which conveys
an evolutionary advantage, and try to calculate whether a long
thin cone is stronger or weaker than a tightly coiled spiral. Or
we might be more ambitious and develop mathematical models
of the evolutionary process itself, with its combination of ran-
dom genetic change-that is, mutations-and natural selection.
A remarkable example of this kind of thinking is a com-
puter simulation of the evolution of the eye by Daniel Nilsson
and Susanne Pelger, published in 1994. Recall that conven-
tional evolutionary theory sees changes in animal form as
being the result of random mutations followed by subsequent
selection of those individuals most able to survive and repro-
duce their kind. When Charles Darwin announced this the-
ory, one of the first objections raised was that complex struc-
tures (like an eye) have to evolve fully formed or else they
won't work properly (half an eye is no use at all), but the
chance that random mutation will produce a coherent set of
complex changes is negligible. Evolutionary theorists quickly
responded that while half an eye may not be much use, a half-
developed eye might well be. One with a retina but no lens,
say, will still collect light and thereby detect movement; and
any way to improve the detection of predators offers an evolu-
tionary advantage to any creature that possesses it. What we
have here is a verbal objection to the theory countered by a
11 NATURE'S NUMBERS

verbal argument. But the recent computer analysis goes much

further.
It starts with a mathematical model of a flat region of cells,
and permits various types of "mutation." Some cells may
become more sensitive to light, for example, and the shape of
the region of cells may bend. The mathematical model is set
up as a computer program that makes tiny random changes of
this kind, calculates how good the resulting structure is at
detecting light and resolving the patterns that it "sees," and
selects any changes that improve these abilities. During a sim-
ulation that corresponds to a period of about four hundred
thousand years-the blink of an eye, in evolutionary terms-
the region of cells folds itself up into a deep, spherical cavity
with a tiny iris like opening and, most dramatically, a lens.
Moreover, like the lenses in our own eyes, it is a lens whose
refractive index-the amount by which it bends light-varies
from place to place. In fact, the pattern of variation of refrac-
tive index that is produced in the computer simulation is very
like our own. So here mathematics shows that eyes definitely
can evolve gradually and naturally, offering increased sur-
vival value at every stage. More than that: Nilsson and Pel-
ger's work demonstrates that given certain key biological fac-
ulties (such as cellular receptivity to light, and cellular
mobility), structures remarkably similar to eyes will form-all
in line with Darwin's principle of natural selection. The
mathematical model provides a lot of extra detail that the ver-
bal Darwinian argument can only guess at, and gives us far
greater confidence that the line of argument is correct.
I said that another function of mathematics is to organize
the underlying patterns and regularities in the most satisfying
way. To illustrate this aspect, let me return to the question
raised in the first chapter. Which-if either-is significant:
 START 176 steps 538 steps

808 steps 1033 steps 1225 steps

1533 steps 1829 steps

FIGURE t.
Computer model of the evolution of an eye. Each step in the computa-
tion corresponds to abOllt two hundred years of biological evolution.
14 NATURE'S NUMBERS

the three-in-a-row pattern of stars in Orion's belt, or the three-

in-a-row pattern to the periods of revolution of Jupiter's satel-
lites? Orion first. Ancient human civilizations organized the
stars in the sky in terms of pictures of animals and mythic
heroes. In these terms, the alignment of the three stars in
Orion appears significant, for otherwise the hero would have
no belt from which to hang his sword. However, if we use
three-dimensional geometry as an organizing principle and
place the three stars in their correct positions in the heavens,
then we find that they are at very different distances from the
Earth. Their equispaced alignment is an accident, depending
on the position from which they are being viewed. Indeed, the
very word "constellation" is a misnomer for an arbitrary acci-
dent of viewpoint.
The numerical relation between the periods of revolution
of 10, Europa, and Ganymede could also be an accident of
viewpoint. How can we be sure that "period of revolution"
has any significant meaning for nature? However, that numer-
ical relation fits into a dynamical framework in a very signifi-
cant manner indeed. It is an example of a resonance, which is
a relationship between periodically moving bodies in which
their cycles are locked together, so that they take up the same
relative positions at regular intervals. This common cycle
time is called the period of the system. The individual bodies
may have different-but related-periods. We can work out
what this relationship is. When a resonance occurs, all of the
participating bodies must return to a standard reference posi-
tion after a whole number of cycles-but that number can be
different for each. So there is some common period for the
system, and therefore each individual body has a period that
is some whole-number divisor of the common period. In this
case, the common period is that of Ganymede, 7.16 days. The
 WHAT MATHEMATiCS is FOR 25

period of Europa is very close to half that of Ganymede, and

that of 10 is close to one-quarter. 10 revolves four times around
Jupiter while Europa revolves twice and Ganymede once,
after which they are all back in exactly the same relative posi-
tions as before. This is called a 4:2:1 resonance.
The dynamics of the Solar System is full of resonances.
The Moon's rotational period is (subject to small wobbles
caused by perturbations from other bodies) the same as its
period of revolution around the Earth-a 1:1 resonance of its
orbital and its rotational period. Therefore, we always see the
same face of the Moon from the Earth, never its "far side."
Mercury rotates once every 58.65 days and revolves around
the Sun every 87.97 days. Now, 2 x 87.97 = 175.94, and 3 x
58.65 = 175.95, so Mercury's rotational and orbital periods are
in a 2:3 resonance. (In fact, for a long time they were thought
to be in 1:1 resonance, both being roughly 88 days, because of
the difficulty of observing a planet as close to the Sun as Mer-
cury is. This gave rise to the belief that one side of Mercury is
incredibly hot and the other incredibly cold, which turns out
not to be true. A resonance, however, there is-and a more
interesting one than mere equality.)
In between Mars and Jupiter is the asteroid belt, a broad
zone containing thousands of tiny bodies. They are not uni-
formly distributed. At certain distances from the Sun we find
asteroid "beltlets"; at other distances we find hardly any. The
explanation-in both cases-is resonance with Jupiter. The
Hilda group of asteroids, one of the beltlets, is in 2:3 reso-
nance with Jupiter. That is, it is at just the right distance so
that all of the Hilda asteroids circle the Sun three times for
every two revolutions of Jupiter. The most noticeable gaps are
at 2:1, 3:1, 4:1, 5:2, and 7:2 resonances. You may be worried
that resonances are being used to explain both clumps and
16 NATURE'S NUMBERS

gaps, The reason is that each resonance has its own idiosyn-
cratic dynamics; some cause clustering, others do the oppo-
site. It all depends on the precise numbers.
Another function of mathematics is prediction. By under-
standing the motion of heavenly bodies, astronomers could
predict lunar and solar eclipses and the return of comets.
They knew where to point their telescopes to find asteroids
that had passed behind the Sun, out of observation?-l contact.
Because the tides are controlled mainly by the position of the
Sun and Moon relative to the Earth, they could predict tides
many years ahead. (The chief complicating factor in making
such predictions is not astronomy: it is the shape of the conti-
nents and the profile of the ocean depths, which can delay or
advance a high tide. However, these stay pretty much the
same from one century to the next, so that once their effects
have been understood it is a routine task to compensate for
them.) In contrast, it is much harder to predict the weather.
We know just as much about the mathematics of weather as
we do about the mathematics of tides, but weather has an
inherent unpredictability. Despite this, meteorologists can
make effective short-term predictions of weather patterns-
say, three or four days in advance. The unpredictability of the
weather, however, has nothing at all to do with randomness-
a topic we will take up in chapter 8, when we discuss the con-
cept of chaos.
The role of mathematics goes beyond mere prediction.
Once you understand how a system works, you don't have to
remain a passive observer. You can attempt to control the sys-
tem, to make it do what you want. It pays not to be too ambi-
tious: weather control, for example, is in its infancy-we can't
make rain with any great success, even when there are rain-
clouds about. Examples of control systems range from the
 WHAT MATHEMATiCS is FOR 27

thermostat on a boiler, which keeps it at a fixed temperature,

to the medieval practice of coppicing woodland. Without a
sophisticated mathematical control system, the space shuttle
would fly like the brick it is, for no human pilot can respond
quickly enough to correct its inherent instabilities. The use of
electronic pacemakers to help people with heart disease is
another example of control.
These examples bring us to the most down-to-earth aspect
of mathematics: its practical applications-how mathematics
earns its keep. Our world rests on mathematical foundations,
and mathematics is unavoidably embedded in our global cul-
ture. The only reason we don't always realize just how
strongly our lives are affected by mathematics is that, for sen-
sible reasons, it is kept as far as possible behind the scenes.
When you go to the travel agent and book a vacation, you
don't need to understand the intricate mathematical and
physical theories that make it possible to design computers
and telephone lines, the optimization routines that schedule
as many flights as possible around any particular airport, or
the signal-processing methods used to provide accurate radar
images for the pilots. When you watch a television program,
you don't need to understand the three-dimensional geometry
used to produce special effects on the screen, the coding
methods used to transmit TV signals by satellite, the mathe-
matical methods used to solve the equations for the orbital
motion of the satellite, the thousands of different applications
of mathematics during every step of the manufacture of every
component of the spacecraft that launched the satellite into
position. When a farmer plants a new strain of potatoes, he
does not need to know the statistical theories of genetics that
identified which genes made that particular type of plant
resistant to disease.
28 NATURE'S NUMBERS

But somebody had to understand all these things in the

past, otherwise airliners, television, spacecraft, and disease-
resistant potatoes wouldn't have been invented. And some-
body has to understand all these things now, too, otherwise
they won't continue to function. And somebody has to be
inventing new mathematics in the future, able to solve prob-
lems that either have not arisen before or have hitherto
proved intractable, otherwise our society will fall apart when
change requires solutions to new problems or new solutions
to old problems. If mathematics, including everything that
rests on it, were somehow suddenly to be withdrawn from our
world, human society would collapse in an instant. And if
mathematics were to be frozen, so that it never went a single
step farther, our civilization would start to go backward.
We should not expect new mathematics to give an immedi-
ate dollars-and-cents payoff. The transfer of a mathematical
idea into something that can be made in a factory or used in a
home generally takes time. Lots of time: a century is not
unusual. In chapter 5, we will see how seventeenth-century
interest in the vibrations of a violin string led, three hundred
years later, to the discovery of radio waves and the invention of
radio, radar, and television. It might have been done quicker,
but not that much quicker. If you think-as many people in our
increasingly managerial culture do-that the process of scien-
tific discovery can be speeded up by focusing on the applica-
tion as a goal and ignoring "curiosity-driven" research, then
you are wrong. In fact that very phrase, "curiosity-driven
research," was introduced fairly recently by unimaginative
bureaucrats as a deliberate put-down. Their desire for tidy pro-
jects offering guaranteed short-term profit is much too simple-
minded, because goal-oriented research can deliver only pre-
dictable results. You have to be able to see the goal in order to
 WHAT MATHEMATiCS is FOR 19

aim at it. But anything you can see, your competitors can see,
too. The pursuance of safe research will impoverish us all. The
really important breakthroughs are always unpredictable. It is
their very unpredictability that makes them important: they
change our world in ways we didn't see coming.
Moreover, goal-oriented research often runs up against a
brick wall, and not only in mathematics. For example, it took
approximately eighty years of intense engineering effort to
develop the photocopying machine after the basic principle of
xerography had been discovered by scientists. The first fax
machine was invented over a century ago, but it didn't work
fast enough or reliably enough. The principle of holography
(three-dimensional pictures, see your credit card) was discov-
ered over a century ago, but nobody then knew how to pro-
duce the necessary beam of coherent light-light with all its
waves in step. This kind of delay is not at all unusual in
industry, let alone in more intellectual areas of research, and
the impasse is usually broken only when an unexpected new
idea arrives on the scene.
There is nothing wrong with goal-oriented research as a
way of achieving specific feasible goals. But the dreamers and
the mavericks must be allowed some free rein, too. Our world
is not static: new problems constantly arise, and old answers
often stop working. Like Lewis Carroll's Red Queen, we must
run very fast in order to stand still.