What does a mathematician do?
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In a playful way, using a simple game of dominoes, the director-general of IMPA, Marcelo Viana, showed the packed auditorium of educators, researchers, parents and students gathered last Saturday, the 11th, for a lecture at Colégio La Salle Abel, in Niterói, what he meant by the phrase he had uttered minutes before: "Doing Mathematics should always mean finding patterns and building beautiful and meaningful explanations".
The statement, actually authored by the American Paul Lockhart – “he plagiarized me in advance,” joked Marcelo – was cited by the director of IMPA as an answer to the question he himself posed to the audience: “What does a mathematician do?”
To reveal the problem, Marcelo called six pairs of students onto the stage, giving each pair a domino set, and asked them to complete the sequence following the logic of the game. However, what the students didn't know was that not all of them had a complete set of pieces. It was, in fact, a trick, because anyone with an odd number of dominoes would never be able to finish the game.
Marcelo then drew a connection between dominoes and the famous Königsberg Bridges problem, deciphered by the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), which gave rise to Graph Theory. According to the theorem, a graph has its circuit closed passing exactly through each of its edges if, and only if, all its vertices are even. "Dominoes work similarly here," explained Marcelo, adding that this model now drives billion-dollar industries, such as logistics.
Present at the event, organized in partnership with the Miraflores Educational Association, Colégio Pedro II – Campus Niterói, the CELART Cultural Forum, and the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics of UFF (IME-UFF), the freshman mathematics student and bronze medalist in the OBMEP in 2011 and 2013, Raul Carvalho, 18 years old, said that the lecture helped to "show a mathematics with practical utility and with other facets rarely presented in high school."
According to Raul, it is increasingly important to present the subject matter as something dynamic and versatile, that "is not only useful for solving exam questions, but also in economics, transportation, and even medicine."
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