I’m delighted to have had the opportunity to write a review of Jessica Wynne’s Do Not Erase: Mathematicians and Their Chalkboards for Plough Quarterly. Here’s how it begins:
In A Mathematician’s Apology, G. H. Hardy writes, “The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colors or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.” Anyone who finds these words utterly baffling – maybe anyone who battled with long division or quadratic equations at school – should have a look at Jessica Wynne’s Do Not Erase: Mathematicians and Their Chalkboards.
Wynne, a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, traveled across North and South America and into Europe to photograph mathematicians’ chalkboards. Nothing more. Not the classrooms in which those chalkboards were found or even the mathematicians who worked on them. Just the chalkboards and the mathematics that filled them. It might seem a niche project but the results are surprisingly beautiful. There really is no place in the world for ugly mathematics.
However, Wynne’s photographs tell only half the story. Accompanying each picture is a short meditation by the mathematicians whose work is seen on the chalkboards. These meditations focus not only on the mathematics, much of which is extremely high level, but also on the sheer physicality of the mathematicians’ work. We tend to think of mathematics as the most cerebral of disciplines, but in this book, we discover how mathematics involves the body just like any other craft.
But why chalkboards? Wouldn’t whiteboards do the job just as well? Aren’t chalkboards redundant in our high-tech world? Not according to Philippe Michel, who holds the chair of analytic number theory at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. Michel sets the tone for the whole book by explaining that “the very first thing I did when I arrived in my office in Lausanne ten years ago was to ask that the ugly whiteboard, with its smelly red pen, be replaced by a true chalkboard.”
You can read the rest of the review here.