“There’s a secret world out there. A hidden parallel universe of beauty and elegance, intricately intertwined with ours. And it’s invisible to most of us.”
Imagine that you had to take an art class in which they taught you only how to paint a fence or a wall, but never showed you the paintings of the great masters. Alas, this is how math is taught, and so for most of us it becomes the intellectual equivalent of watching paint dry. Edward Frenkel wants to open this secret world to all of us because it can teach us so much about the mysteries of the Universe. In this talk, he weaves the discovery of math with his personal journey, addressing the existential questions of finding out who we are; of truth, courage, and passion.
Edward Frenkel is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, which he joined in 1997 after being on the faculty at Harvard University. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, and the winner of the Hermann Weyl Prize in mathematical physics. Frenkel has authored three books and over eighty scholarly articles in academic journals, and he has lectured on his work around the world. His YouTube videos have garnered over 3 million views combined.
Frenkel’s latest book “Love and Math” was a New York Times bestseller and has been named one of the Best Books of 2013 by both Amazon and iBooks. It is being translated into 14 languages. Frenkel has also co-produced, co-directed and played the lead in the film “Rites of Love and Math” (2010).
