Count Him In

Math? It's All Around to Be Found. One Writer Is Positive He's Equal to the Task.

NEW YORK

Math is hot. The TV show "Numb3rs," featuring a crime-solving mathematician, is a hit. In the past few years there has been a run of popular math movies, including "Pi," "Good Will Hunting" and "A Beautiful Mind," the Russell Crowe film about Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash that grossed more than $170 million.

The truth is, math has been hot for eons. It has given civilization, among other things, time, distance, weight, currency, commerce, computers, "Sesame Street," speedometers, the NFL, Pixar, Yahoo!, iPods and "The Da Vinci Code." It makes life easier, more manageable and more orderly.

Except when it comes to the problems that can't be solved.

Dan Rockmore is fascinated by just such a problem. He's 43, an easygoing, wire-haired professor of mathematics at Dartmouth College and author of the just-published "Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis: The Quest to Find the Hidden Law of Prime Numbers."

The Riemann hypothesis is one of the Seven Millennium Problems posed by the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Mass., and whoever proves it will win $1 million. The seven, writes Stanford mathematician Keith Devlin, are "the hardest and most important unsolved mathematics problems in the world; they have resisted numerous attempts at solution, over many years, by the best mathematical minds around."

So far, none has been conclusively solved. But that doesn't keep mathematicians from trying.

To understand how someone can spend hours, days, years wrestling with an insoluble problem, you have to look at the world through a mathematician's eyes. That's where Rockmore comes in. He's not one of those fluky-flakey number nerds you read about. He's a hiker, a tennis player, a distance runner. He's got a loving family, a Manhattan pied-à-terre and patience enough to explain math to the unmathematical. He is an expositor who scored higher on his verbal SATs than on his math and he has agreed to spend the afternoon walking you through some of the toughest concepts in math -- literally.

Over lunch at Il Mediterraneo, near his apartment on the Upper East Side, he begins with a piece of cake. Say that you and he want to split a single piece of cake. You each want a fair share, so you agree that Dan will slice the cake and you will choose the half you want. Dan cuts it down the middle and you take the piece that you think is slightly larger. Now Dan feels like he has gotten an equal portion -- he cut it in half, remember -- and, because you were given a choice, you believe that you have gotten slightly more than Dan got. Miraculously, the two halves will seem to add up to more than a whole.

This is known as the Mathematics of Envy and it's only one small way that a mathematician tries -- tries -- to make sense of this complex and perplexing world.

Mathematicians move around the world in different ways from the rest of us. They live in a parallel reality -- seeing numbers where we see words, equations where we see poetry. "In order to understand the universe," Galileo wrote in the 17th century, "you must know the language in which it is written. And that language is mathematics."

Rockmore gestures toward wine bottles that are stored, bottoms out, in cubbyholes above the cafe bar. "I see circles and polyhedra," he says.