‘SOBRE MATES Y MITOS’, TEAMCO IN SPANISH NATIONAL PRESS
Café y Teoremas is a space that the ICMAT (Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Madrid) coordinates in the Science section of El País. Researchers and members of the mathematical community describe the latest advances in this discipline and share meeting points between mathematics and other social and cultural expressions.
El País is the most known newspaper in Spain with 1,862,000 daily readers according to the General Media Study (EGM). According to this numbers, we are more than proud to see our contribution «Maths and myths» in El País, we hope to have reach readers who are passionate about science (and mythology).
The mythological origin of some math problems
The idea of this project was born when we noticed that many mathematical problems have their origin in the most ancient stories, even mythological ones.
In this article ‘Sobre mates y mitos‘ we tell, for example, how the legend of the phoenician princess Dido is directly related to the famous isoperimetric problem. This problem poses how to find the optimal shape of a terrain that can be delimited by a rope of given length, in order to achieve a specific aim such as covering the largest possible area.
We also explain the cruel story behind the Proscrustes problem. The most basic instance of this problem is, given two matrices, to find a way to multiply one of them by an orthogonal matrix so that they overlap in the most exact way.
But our favourite myth comes from the unresolved problem we are most related to at Teamco: Smale’s seventh problem for the 21st century, which is closely related to the myth of Zeus and Io, and more specifically to the giant Argos Panoptes.
If you speak Spanish and want to learn more about these myths, please read our article!
