Интервью с получателем премии за приложения математики

Yves Meyer, the 2010 Gauss prize winner -- http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/10dec2010/1501.pdf

In France, more than in other countries, we believe that mathematics is the language in which all the scientific knowledge shall be written eventually.

The jury of the Gauss Prize liked the absence of clear frontiers between pure and applied mathematics in my research.

The positions of atoms in certain alloys exactly obey the mathematical rules I had discovered 15 years ago. This striking example proves that mathematicians can be prophetic.

It is clear that what is taught nowadays at high school is negligible both in quality and quantity, compared to what we were learning in the fifties. But the number of teenagers attending high school is much larger. People are right saying that the educational level has increased on the average. People are also right saying that the smartest of our children are not stimulated the way they should be.

Teaching mathematics is quite distinct from teaching other fields. In mathematics, the student can state that the teacher is wrong and prove his claim. You cannot prove to your physics teacher that the electron does not exist. What is fascinating in teaching mathematics is that a student can be smarter than you. It is the only field in science where this equality between you and the student exists. The student has to be a believer in all other fields. A student in physics cannot reproduce the experience by Michelson and Morley, which opened the gate to Einstein’s work on relativity. The student has to take for granted the results of this experience. It is a kind of religious attitude. This religious attitude does not exist in mathematics. You can check everything by yourself.

via http://aron-turgenev.livejournal.com/285737.html