Rome hosts a festival for beautiful minds

By Sara Patterson

ROME, March 14—If you thought mathematical puzzles were nothing more than the preferred torture weapons of overzealous high school Algebra teachers, one festival happening in Rome this weekend may change your mind.

The second annual Festival of Mathematics at the Auditorium Parco della Musica kicked off yesterday morning with a day full of mathematics games, shows, and lectures. Bright minds of all ages crowded around staff members who engaged the audience with riddles and demonstrations.

The festival will continue through Sunday when John Nash, Nobel Memorial Prize winner and subject of the academy award winning film “A Beautiful Mind” will speak on game theory and living with schizophrenia. Each day, topics ranging from “math with superheroes” to “math and magic” will present a new way to look at the subject.

 

“Listening to famous mathematicians can help the students realize that math is actually related to all sorts of problems in everyday life,” said John Cabot University Statistics Professor Stefano Arnone.

Calculus Professor Stefano Capparelli agreed, saying students who listen to the top scholars with an open mind may discover “unexpected panoramas.”

Features on Thursday afternoon included lectures from two noted scholars. Prize-winning author and poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger said the probability of marrying the right person is virtually nonexistent in his lecture entitled “The Mathematics of Luck.”

Yet, people still take the risk and believe they have found the right one out of billions, he added.

Nobel Memorial Prize winning economist Amartya Sen followed with a lecture about the connection between mathematics and social sciences. He focused on the role of mathematics in economic theory, and criticized the “narrow-mindedness” of those who are not tolerant of all forms of reasoning, even reasoning outside of math.

Thirty-six year old JCU alumnus Elena Sannella attended both lectures and said Amartya Sen’s closing statements interested her the most. She said the “fact that mathematical reasoning does not consider social variables and, therefore, does not achieve to make economics an exact science” opened horizons in her thinking.

Sannella said she attended the festival out of curiosity and plans on coming back. She said she would definitely recommend the festival to current students at JCU. “Aren’t they curious to know?”