A few days ago I began a series of articles on the importance of mathematics. Today I noticed a nice post by Antonia Cangiano at Math-Blog promoting a wonderful speech given by mathematician Timothy Gowers at the 2000 Millenium Meeting in Paris. Not only does the title of his speech match the title of this little blog series, but the speech is so well crafted that it deserves an elevated stage. Not only does it serve its title well, but it takes a look at a broad array of mathematical fields, models, and tools. Nearly all adult users of mathematics should get something out of it, and some bright students will hopefully be inspired. I hope this post encourages just a few people to watch who have not yet seen it.

Here it is, broken into 8 parts, plus a PDF transcript:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Transcript

This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 7:53 am and is filed under Mathematics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.