Professor Jaroslav Nešetřil: Why we must teach our children the beauty of mathematics, and start (more) maths museums

Interview by Edward Krudy

19 March 2020

A conversation with Professor Jaroslav Nešetřil

Imagine if art classes at school were like teaching children how to paint the walls of a house. That is what leading mathematician Professor Jaroslav Nešetřil believes the current state of maths teaching is like for millions children. If we want to open up the beauty of maths and the benefits it can give us we need to start thinking about maths teaching in an entirely different way, says Prof. Nešetřil, Director of the Center of Excellence - Institute of Theoretical Computer Science, at Prague’s Charles University.

“We are educating kids in art showing them Van Gogh, showing them Picasso, showing them Michelangelo, showing them the stars of the past and in mathematics we are not doing that because it’s much more difficult to do. We are just showing them how to paint walls,” said Prof. Nešetřil, who has 55 years of experience as a teacher of maths, mainly at university level.

Prof. Nestril spoke to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences via phone from Prague shortly after the event of the International Day of Mathematics on March 14. Like many in Europe he is currently working from home because of the public health crisis that has engulfed the continent. His university is shuttered and classes suspended. Despite that, he remains positive about his research and waxes eloquently about his subject and the need for a new approach to teaching.

Nešetřil credits the comparison with art teaching to renowned mathematician Edward Frankel and his book Click here for the Hungarian translation of the book.Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality (Basic Book: 2013). For Nešetřil the teaching of maths should at least strive to be about big ideas, the view of vast vistas of human endeavor seen from the peaks of mountain tops.

“We should try to portray mathematics more like the awareness of beauty or mathematics as a way of living”, said Prof. Nešetřil. “Mathematics, aside from beauty, is a reservoir of ideas, and tricks, and approaches to reality.”

Professor Jaroslav Nešetřil

Another work Nešetřil cites is Misha Gromov’s Great Circle of Mysteries: Mathematics, the World, the Mind (Birkhäuser: 2018), which tells us that “mathematics is the only light that can illuminate the mysteries of this world”.

“Gromov is claiming that mathematics is a key to the solution of the mysteries in the sense of everything that was created over thousands of years of history, that is very difficult to convey but we have to try,” said Prof. Nešetřil.

The International Mathematical Union led the initiative to have UNESCO announce March 14 2020 as the first ever International Day of Mathematics, with the theme “Mathematics is Everywhere”. March 14 was especially apt as the day was already known as Pi day because the numbers 3.14 are the first three digits of the mathematical constant Pi or π, the ratio of the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter, and probably one of the most recognizable mathematical symbols.

"It is not only that kids are missing out on the beauty of mathematics. The lack of teaching methods that inspire young people and draw them into mathematics could also be putting Europe at a serious disadvantage to societies where people are more engaged with maths and results in the subject are generally better," said Prof. Nešetřil.

“For us in Europe, in the West, it is dangerous. In Europe, mathematics seem to be not very popular in every country on lists of students and even parents. But if you go to the Far East to China, Japan, Korea it is actually the other way around, it is actually one of the most popular subjects. And that I find is a danger for our Western civilization,” said Prof. Nešetřil.

Prof. Nešetřil points to a 2012 maths exhibition in Paris called Mathematics: a Beautiful Elsewhere organized by the Foundation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. The exhibition brought together mathematicians and artists such as Patti Smith and David Lynch with the aim of ‘offering visitors, to use the mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck’s expression, “a sudden change of scenery.”’

Hoping to increase public involvement in mathematics, Prof. Nešetřil has been pushing for a museum of mathematics in Prague similar to other institutions they have around the world.

“There is a museum of mathematics in New York, and there are several museums of mathematics in Germany, and there will be one at the Henri Poincaré Institute in Paris, which is under construction, and I have spoken to several people here that it would be a very good idea for the public,” said Nešetřil.

Prof. Nešetřil together with Hungarian scientists László Albert-Barabási and László Lovász recently won a 9.3 million euro European Research Council Synergy grant for a project entitled Dynamics and Structure of Networks. The project is described as “a permanent conversation” to “explore real networks, from cell biology to brain science and transportation and communication networks.”

The project will run for six years. So far the Czech side of the project has started two advanced classes in network science at Charles University and is currently on the verge of hiring two post-doctoral researchers from the United States and Mexico. One is a computer specialist the other a mathematician.

Among Nešetřil's recent publications related to the project is A Unified Approach to Structural Limits and Limits of Graphs with Bounded Tree-Depth coauthored by Patrice Ossona de Mendez at the Centre d’Analyse et de Mathématiques Sociales, Paris, France recently published in Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society.

Prof. Nešetřil is hopeful that life will return to normal over the summer. Mathematics has a lot to tell us about the progress of an epidemic using concepts such as probability and population dynamics that have been well understood for over a century. What remains more unpredictable, according to Prof. Nešetřil, is the societal and political responses that can be something of a wildcard.