Universal Dependencies - English - GUM

s-1

GUM_interview_shalev-1

Wikinews interviews Israeli mathematician and writer Aner Shalev

s-2

GUM_interview_shalev-2

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

s-3

GUM_interview_shalev-3

Aner Shalev is an Israeli mathematician and writer born in 1958 in Kibbutz Kinneret, Tiberias.

s-4

GUM_interview_shalev-4

Currently Shalev is a Professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Einstein Institute of Mathematics.

s-5

GUM_interview_shalev-5

At the moment Shalev is in Levico Terme, Trento, Italy for a conference.

s-6

GUM_interview_shalev-6

He was interviewed by Wikinews.

s-7

GUM_interview_shalev-7

Interview

s-8

GUM_interview_shalev-8

Aner Shalev

s-9

GUM_interview_shalev-9

What are you going to talk about here in Levico?

s-10

GUM_interview_shalev-10

I called it Character, walks and words.

s-11

GUM_interview_shalev-11

There is a whole topic which is called asymptotic groups theory.

s-12

GUM_interview_shalev-12

There are groups which express the symmetry of some structures.

s-13

GUM_interview_shalev-13

Studying groups is a bit like studying symmetry.

s-14

GUM_interview_shalev-14

It's very beautiful I think.

s-15

GUM_interview_shalev-15

And then when you do it in an asymptotic way is like you don't look at the small details.

s-16

GUM_interview_shalev-16

It's like from the sky.

s-17

GUM_interview_shalev-17

You look at the general patterns.

s-18

GUM_interview_shalev-18

And there is another topic which is very important in mathematics which is called representation theory.

s-19

GUM_interview_shalev-19

So I will mainly talk about how to use a representation theory to solve all kind of problems and conjectures in asymptotic groups theory.

s-20

GUM_interview_shalev-20

Why did you choose to study mathematics?

s-21

GUM_interview_shalev-21

First of all because it was beautiful.

s-22

GUM_interview_shalev-22

When I was ten my father already showed me some stuff in mathematics and the beauty and the imagination was quite apparent.

s-23

GUM_interview_shalev-23

I also like the freedom in mathematics.

s-24

GUM_interview_shalev-24

If you study physics or chemistry then you should describe the real world.

s-25

GUM_interview_shalev-25

But in mathematics you can build your own structures.

s-26

GUM_interview_shalev-26

You can walk in worlds created by the imagination of people.

s-27

GUM_interview_shalev-27

You're not committed to the real world.

s-28

GUM_interview_shalev-28

It's almost like God to some extent.

s-29

GUM_interview_shalev-29

You can create worlds, you can study them.

s-30

GUM_interview_shalev-30

I think it's a combination of the beauty, of the imagination, of the freedom.

s-31

GUM_interview_shalev-31

Many people, and many students, dislike math.

s-32

GUM_interview_shalev-32

Why do you think it is so?

s-33

GUM_interview_shalev-33

First of all I think maybe they have bad teachers, which is a problem.

s-34

GUM_interview_shalev-34

You have to have very good teachers in mathematics if you really want to enjoy and to succeed in it.

s-35

GUM_interview_shalev-35

Probably some people mainly think about the scientific part of it – you have to be accurate - and they see less these elements of the freedom, and the imagination, and creation.

s-36

GUM_interview_shalev-36

Maybe they don't like the precise nature of mathematics.

s-37

GUM_interview_shalev-37

Also when I talk mathematics I notice the language is very important in mathematics and I actually notice that many times people fail in mathematics because they don't know how to write a composition.

s-38

GUM_interview_shalev-38

They have ideas but they cannot formulate them in the right way.

s-39

GUM_interview_shalev-39

Actually I find many connections between mathematics and literature because almost all the thing I told about mathematics are also seen in literature and in writing because when you write you can describe the real world, but you can also create worlds of fiction.

s-40

GUM_interview_shalev-40

So you have imagination, you have total freedom, you can invent characters, you can invent all kind of development and surprises and this kind of end of story or another.

s-41

GUM_interview_shalev-41

Also the language is important in writing and in literature.

s-42

GUM_interview_shalev-42

So in a way people often don't know how to combine the two fields.

s-43

GUM_interview_shalev-43

It could look like almost the opposite: literature is kind of arts and mathematics is science but they also see a lot in common and there where mathematician who were writers.

s-44

GUM_interview_shalev-44

For example the most famous is Lewis Carrol, author of Alice in Wonderland.

s-45

GUM_interview_shalev-45

You're not only a mathematician.

s-46

GUM_interview_shalev-46

You also wrote two collections of short stories and a novel.

s-47

GUM_interview_shalev-47

Why did you begin to write?

s-48

GUM_interview_shalev-48

When I was quite young I was interested in psychoanalysis and in dreams.

s-49

GUM_interview_shalev-49

I was trying to interpret my dreams.

s-50

GUM_interview_shalev-50

I started to write down my dreams.

s-51

GUM_interview_shalev-51

And then I noticed that I cheat a little bit when I write them down.

s-52

GUM_interview_shalev-52

Sometimes I make them more pretty then they were actually.

s-53

GUM_interview_shalev-53

So instead of documenting the dreams it gradually became also like adding creational elements, and I think that somehow through writing my dreams I gradually came to writing, also poems, but mainly stories.

s-54

GUM_interview_shalev-54

I'm a little bit inspired by dreams but when eventually I started to write more seriously I was more interested in structure which also .. a bit like mathematics in a way .. for example my first book is called Opus 1 .. a collection of four long stories with musical structures.

s-55

GUM_interview_shalev-55

The first part is called Legato and the second part was called Staccato.

s-56

GUM_interview_shalev-56

In the legato part the sentences are very long and without breaks almost like stream of consciousness.

s-57

GUM_interview_shalev-57

In the staccato part it's like a music: a lot of break, very very short sentences.

s-58

GUM_interview_shalev-58

It was a bit experimenting connections between the language and the music and the psychology of people.

s-59

GUM_interview_shalev-59

In the second book I made another experiment.

s-60

GUM_interview_shalev-60

It's a book of opening, Overtures I called it, and there is no end to the stories.

s-61

GUM_interview_shalev-61

There are seventy beginning of stories without ends.

s-62

GUM_interview_shalev-62

In the novel Dark Matters I think what interested me in the structure was two thing: simple narrative and email.

s-63

GUM_interview_shalev-63

It keeps changing between narrative and email.

s-64

GUM_interview_shalev-64

Another thing was two different time scapes: one goes very slow and one goes very fast and they almost kind of meet in the end.

s-65

GUM_interview_shalev-65

It's a little bit like Achilles and the turtle.

s-66

GUM_interview_shalev-66

... love story and romance and surprises and tragedies and all this but also this structure interested me a lot.

s-67

GUM_interview_shalev-67

Why did you choose this particular structure?

s-68

GUM_interview_shalev-68

When I tell stories I don't like that everything will be clear from the beginning.

s-69

GUM_interview_shalev-69

I like that something will be a bit of secret, or even unreliable narrator: someone tells something and first you trust him but then you read more and you become thrilled by everything.

s-70

GUM_interview_shalev-70

I think by using emails on the one hand which are more the voice of the woman Eva and narrative which is more the perspective of the man Adam, I kind of confront them, their different perspective and then kind somehow you can see the distortions in the way the story is told.

s-71

GUM_interview_shalev-71

I think that in this kind of structure there is a very gradual clarification of the relationship and the forth going on.