| s-1
| Wikinews interviews Israeli mathematician and writer Aner Shalev |
| s-2
| Wednesday, September 19, 2007 |
| s-3
| Aner Shalev is an Israeli mathematician and writer born in 1958 in Kibbutz Kinneret, Tiberias. |
| s-4
| Currently Shalev is a Professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Einstein Institute of Mathematics. |
| s-5
| At the moment Shalev is in Levico Terme, Trento, Italy for a conference. |
| s-6
| He was interviewed by Wikinews. |
| s-7
| Interview |
| s-8
| Aner Shalev |
| s-9
| What are you going to talk about here in Levico? |
| s-10
| I called it Character, walks and words. |
| s-11
| There is a whole topic which is called asymptotic groups theory. |
| s-12
| There are groups which express the symmetry of some structures. |
| s-13
| Studying groups is a bit like studying symmetry. |
| s-14
| It's very beautiful I think. |
| s-15
| And then when you do it in an asymptotic way is like you don't look at the small details. |
| s-16
| It's like from the sky. |
| s-17
| You look at the general patterns. |
| s-18
| And there is another topic which is very important in mathematics which is called representation theory. |
| s-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
| Why did you choose to study mathematics? |
| s-21
| First of all because it was beautiful. |
| s-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
| I also like the freedom in mathematics. |
| s-24
| If you study physics or chemistry then you should describe the real world. |
| s-25
| But in mathematics you can build your own structures. |
| s-26
| You can walk in worlds created by the imagination of people. |
| s-27
| You're not committed to the real world. |
| s-28
| It's almost like God to some extent. |
| s-29
| You can create worlds, you can study them. |
| s-30
| I think it's a combination of the beauty, of the imagination, of the freedom. |
| s-31
| Many people, and many students, dislike math. |
| s-32
| Why do you think it is so? |
| s-33
| First of all I think maybe they have bad teachers, which is a problem. |
| s-34
| You have to have very good teachers in mathematics if you really want to enjoy and to succeed in it. |
| s-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
| Maybe they don't like the precise nature of mathematics. |
| s-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
| They have ideas but they cannot formulate them in the right way. |
| s-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
| 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
| Also the language is important in writing and in literature. |
| s-42
| So in a way people often don't know how to combine the two fields. |
| s-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
| For example the most famous is Lewis Carrol, author of Alice in Wonderland. |
| s-45
| You're not only a mathematician. |
| s-46
| You also wrote two collections of short stories and a novel. |
| s-47
| Why did you begin to write? |
| s-48
| When I was quite young I was interested in psychoanalysis and in dreams. |
| s-49
| I was trying to interpret my dreams. |
| s-50
| I started to write down my dreams. |
| s-51
| And then I noticed that I cheat a little bit when I write them down. |
| s-52
| Sometimes I make them more pretty then they were actually. |
| s-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
| 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
| The first part is called Legato and the second part was called Staccato. |
| s-56
| In the legato part the sentences are very long and without breaks almost like stream of consciousness. |
| s-57
| In the staccato part it's like a music: a lot of break, very very short sentences. |
| s-58
| It was a bit experimenting connections between the language and the music and the psychology of people. |
| s-59
| In the second book I made another experiment. |
| s-60
| It's a book of opening, Overtures I called it, and there is no end to the stories. |
| s-61
| There are seventy beginning of stories without ends. |
| s-62
| In the novel Dark Matters I think what interested me in the structure was two thing: simple narrative and email. |
| s-63
| It keeps changing between narrative and email. |
| s-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
| It's a little bit like Achilles and the turtle. |
| s-66
| ... love story and romance and surprises and tragedies and all this but also this structure interested me a lot. |
| s-67
| Why did you choose this particular structure? |
| s-68
| When I tell stories I don't like that everything will be clear from the beginning. |
| s-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
| 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
| I think that in this kind of structure there is a very gradual clarification of the relationship and the forth going on. |