The board of directors of the Museu de les Matemàtiques de Catalunya (wonderful, go ahead) says that the party it has organized this Sunday at its headquarters, the Can Mercader park in Cornellà, was because it has just turned eight of age and, go with the guild of numbers! That is, depending on how you look at it, an inaccuracy. It is true that On February 2, 2014, it opened its doors for the first time. macaacronym for the museum, but it is also before that date this jewel already existed, even if it was travelingbecause a group of Catalan mathematicians (Josep Rey, Pura Fornals, Enric Brasó and Guido Ramellini, among others) had built, with a lot of carpentry and other bricolage, devices of all kinds to demonstrate that this branch of science is not so fearsome. Periodically they went on excursions with their inventions, as if they were Melquíades himself traveling to Macondo, and so successful were they in each expedition, in short, that they founded a museum. They did it eight years ago, yes, but with that nomadic background it would be necessary to add a few decimals to the anniversary.
Through the rooms of this center that at times seems to house the soul of the first Science Museum of Barcelona, the one from before it changed into the current CosmoCaixa and of which those who knew it have such good memories, passed in 2019, before the pandemic, more than 100,000 peoplethat is, the least expected day they put themselves ahead of the very expensive Museu d’Història de Catalunya, because they have been several heads ahead of the Fundació Tàpies for a long time, said this for comparison, a not insignificant figure if you take into account account the adverse general conditions against which this unique space has struggled.
The first has been the two years of the pandemic, which have reduced the influx of public. The second, which deals with mathematics, a subject to which many are on their guard. And the third, which is in Cornellà, which is easily reached by metro, but which for the average Barcelonan is a directly unknown land. In fact, Barcelona has been fooling around for years with the idea of making a takeover bid for the museum, but there is no way to close the operation. Barcelona has never had anyone with the determination of Mayor Antoni Balmón, who when he found out that that troupe of mathematicians who, like carnies, were going from here to there with their gadgets, called them personally by phone and offered them a complete plant no less than in a 19th century mansion, in Can Mercader. They couldn’t believe it and it was true.
Mmaca’s anniversary party has been, as befits these ages, eight years old, partly in the open air, partly in the park. There it has been possible to assemble a manageable version of the famous self-supporting bridge that Leonardo da Vinci included in his Atlantic Codex, capable of withstanding unimaginable weights by boat, and also a dome by the same Italian genius, a feat of geometry. That is the essence of Mmaca. It is not pen and paper mathematics, of blackboards and equations, but manipulative. Building with your hands a Catalan volta with stuffed blocks and that it stands up never ceases to amaze.
Melquíades came to Macondo with a spyglass and thus demonstrated to the inhabitants of that town imagined by Gabriel García Márquez in ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ that science, what things are, had ended up eliminating distances, and One enters Mmaca without realizing that on leaving one will be amazed at the simplicity with which the Pythagorean theorem can be explained to a student with a simple scale. There are dozens of different formulas to reach that end, to show that the sum of the square of the legs is equal to the square of the hypotenuse in a triangle. There is even one of the formulas that bears the signature of a President of the United States, James A. Garfield, for whom mathematics was an entertaining hobby before he was shot three times. But the one exhibited by Mmaca in one of its rooms, with a simple scale, so simple, it’s great.
The Mmaca touches different branches of mathematics. One of the rooms, for example, the one named after Lluís Santaló, a prodigious mathematician who ended up in exile as a Republican, should be visited before playing the Euromillions or buying numbers from the National lotterywhat some of the founders of the museum graciously and correctly call “the tax paid voluntarily by those who do not know mathematics & rdquor;. If statistics and probability were taught as they deserve in schools, the boy singers of the Colegio de San Ildefonso would soon become extinct.
Are the praises counted here exaggerated? There is an anecdote in these eight years of museum history that proves that all applause falls short. It was as a result of a visit that Jin Akiyama made in his day, a character that only four know on this side of the globe, but who in Japan is a celebrity who signs autographs on the street. His popularity comes from the way he plays with math on a TV show. The fact is that he visited the museum and he liked it so much that he told the then Japanese consul in Barcelona, Hiroyuki Makiuchi, who raised the enthusiasm to the nth degree and ended up organizing an excursion to Mmaca with some of his colleagues from other consular delegations. For Makiuchi, this space in Cornellà was the perfect demonstration of how, without huge investments (such as those made by other of the few mathematics museums in the world, the German Mathematikum of Guiessen or the MoMath of New York) gigantic exportable results could be achieved to third world countries with scarce resources. For the founders of Mmaca, that was as if they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Mathematics, a prize that, curiously, does not exist, something that is falsely attributed to the fact that the third partner of Alfred Nobel cleared up more than just unknowns with a mathematician with whom he fell in love. .
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That the anniversary to be celebrated this year is number eight has invited (how those of the guild are for these questions) to look for coincidences. The most obvious, as Pura Fornals explains, is that the birthday was exactly 02-02-2022, whose numbers add up to precisely eight. And on 02-22-2022, in three weeks, they have summoned all fans to a conference at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya whose underlying theme can be deduced if you look closely at the date. will be about capicua numbers and, already put, about palindromesthose phrases that are read the same way forwards as backwards (“flirting is being agile” “the route gave us another natural step”…).
And in March, month 3 of the year, day 14, they will celebrate accordingly, World Pi Day, which invites us to repeat another anecdote, which in this case illustrates how unique mathematicians are sometimes. It is attributed to Thomas Fantet de Lagny, a French mathematician who lived between the 17th and 18th centuries. It is said that he had been silent for several days on his deathbed. He didn’t say no to me. He did not react to any stimulus until someone who knew him well came up to his ear and asked him what the square of 12 was. He answered immediately. 144. De Lagny impressed his contemporaries because he calculated 120 decimal places for Pi, although, to be fair, only 112 were correct.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com