Who foots the bill for an otherworldly enterprise like the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute? Though it hovers over the Berkeley campus like the floating isle of Laputa, it is not part of the university. Much of its funding comes from the government: the National Science Foundation and—significantly—the National Security Agency, which, unlike the sinister and slightly ridiculous CIA, actually does useful intelligence work. The rest of the money comes from a number of universities and corporations. Last month a conference on operator algebras—pretty rarefied and abstract stuff—turned out to be sponsored by NATO. You mean that NATO, I asked incredulously? The same.
Of course, you can never tell when “pure” mathematics is going to end up serving practical ends. Take number theory—the so-called “higher arithmetic.” For centuries this was thought to be the most beautiful branch of mathematics because of the supreme uselessness of the mysterious relations it revealed among the whole numbers. (“All art is completely useless,” as Oscar Wilde said.) Then a couple of decades ago a new kind of unbreakable coding system, based on the difficulty of factoring large numbers into primes, was discovered. Today the work of the number theorists I chat with in the hallways up here is as abstruse and elegant and intellectually pleasurable as it was in the days of Gauss. Yet now the security of communications depends on it.
Sometimes, after inhaling too much of the ethereal air at MSRI, I must remind myself: Life is Bigger than Mathematics. Down below, in the People’s Republic of Berkeley, there is another world: a world of aging hippies who dropped too much acid in the ‘60s, a world gentle of people who wear flowers in their hair. Descending into it, I visit the People’s Park—a few ragged acres of grass and trees off Telegraph Avenue that must be one of the most culturally fraught patches of real estate in the world. In the late ‘60s the People’s Park was liberated, amid bloodshed and one death, by an alliance of student radicals, Yippies, and the Black Panthers. Today it remains a redoubt of what is left of the lotus-eating counterculture.
I chat with a couple of young hippy chicks who have been dossing down there for a few days. “Think of your body as a flower,” one of them tells me, insisting that certain practices are not really dirty.
“It’s been groovy rapping with you!” I say as I take my leave, employing what I believe to be their own dialect.
Back at MSRI, I am alone in my office except for my little dachshund Renzo, whom I sometimes bring along for company. I am looking at a book on the Banach-Tarski theorem. This theorem implies that it is possible to cut up a pea and reassemble the pieces to make a solid sphere the size of the sun. I simply can’t get my mind around the proof of it. My mathematical faculties, not terribly impressive even in my youth, seem to have shut down in middle age.
I recall a wise and funny thing that James Carville said early in the first term of the Clinton administration: “Why does a dog lick his dick? Because he can do it. Why don’t we balance the budget? Because we can’t do it.” Why are my colleagues at MSRI real mathematicians? Because they can do it. Why am I just a journalist? Because I can’t do it.
I continue to ponder the Banach-Tarski theorem. Meanwhile on the floor beside me, my dog is … well, let’s just say he’s “balancing the budget.”
