Transcript of “The Map of Mathematics”

The mathematics in school does not quite do the field of

mathematics justice. We only get a glimpse at one corner of it,
but the mathematics as a whole is huge and wonderfully
diverse subject. My aim with this video is to show you all that
amazing stuff. We’ll start back at the very beginning. The origin
of mathematics lies in counting. In fact, counting is not just a
human trait, other animals are able to count as well and
evidence for human counting goes back to prehistoric times
with check marks made in bones. There were several
innovations over the years with the Egyptians having the first
equation, the ancient Greeks made strides in many areas like
geometry and numerology, and negative were invented in
china. And zero as a number was first used in India. Then in the
Golden Age of Islam Persian mathematicians made further
strides and the first book on algebra was written. Then
mathematics boomed in the renaissance along with the
sciences. Now there is lot more to the history of mathematics
then what I have just said, but I’m gonna jump to the modern
age and mathematics as we know it now.
Modern mathematics can be broadly be broken down into
two areas, pure maths: the study of mathematics for its own
sake, and applied maths: when you develop mathematics to
help solve some real world problem. But there is a lot of
crossover. In fact, many times in history someone’s gone off
into the mathematical wilderness motivated purely by curiosity
and kind of guided by a sense of aesthetics. And then they have
created a whole bunch of new mathematics which was nice and
interesting but does not really do anything useful. But then, say
a hundred years later, someone will be working on some
problem at the cutting edge of physics or computer science and
they’ll discover that this old theory in pure maths is exactly
what they need to solve their real world problems! Which is
amazing, I think! And this kind of thing has happened so many
times over the last few centuries. It is interesting how often
something so abstract ends up being really useful. But I should
also mention, pure mathematics on its own is still a very
valuable thing to do because it can be fascinating and on its

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own can have a real beauty and elegance that almost becomes
like art. Okay enough of this highfalutin, let’s get into it.
PURE MATHS is made of several sections. The study of
numbers starts with the natural numbers and what you can do
with them with arithmetic operations. And then it looks at other
kinds of numbers like integers, which contain negative
numbers, rational numbers like fractions, real numbers which
include numbers like pi which go off to infinite decimal points,
and then complex numbers and a whole bunch of others. Some
numbers have interesting properties like Prime Numbers, or pi
or the exponential. There also properties of these number
systems, for example, even though there is an infinite amount
of both integers and real numbers, there are more real numbers
than integers. So, some infinity is bigger than others. The study
of structures is where you start taking numbers and putting
them into equations in the form of variables. Algebra contains
the rules of how you then manipulate these equations. Here you
will also find vectors and matrices which are multi-dimensional
numbers, and the rules of how they relate to each other are
captured in linear algebra. Numbers theory studies the features
of everything in the last section on numbers like the properties
of prime numbers. Combinatorics looks at he properties of
certain structures like trees, graphs, and other things the are
made of discreet chunks that you can count. Group theory looks
at objects that are related to each other in, well, groups. A
familiar example is a Rubik’s cube which is an example of a
permutation group. And order theory investigates how to
arrange objects following certain rules like, how something is a
larger quantity than something else. The natural numbers are
an example of an ordered set of objects, but anything with any
two ways relationship can be ordered. Another part of pure
mathematics looks at shapes and how they behave in spaces.
The origin is in geometry which include Pythagoras and is close
to trigonometry which we are all familiar with form school. Also
there are fun things like fractal geometry which are
mathematical patterns which are scale invariant, which means
you can zoom into them forever and the always look king of
same. Topology looks at different properties of spaces where
we are allowed to continuously deform them but not tear or

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glue them. For example, a Möbius strip has only one surface
and one edge whatever you do to it. And coffee cups and
donuts are the same thing -topologically speaking. Measure
theory is a way to assign values to spaces or sets trying
together numbers and spaces. And finally, differential geometry
looks the properties of shapes on curved surfaces, for example
triangles haves got different angles on a curved surface, and
brings us to the next section, which is changes. the study of
changes contains calculus which involves integrals and
differentials which looks at area spanned out by functions or the
behaviour of gradients of functions. And vector calculus looks at
the same things for vectors. Here we also find a bunch of other
areas like dynamical systems which looks at systems that
evolve in time from one state to another, like fluid flows or
things with feedback loops like ecosystems. and chaos theory
which studies dynamical systems that are very sensitive to
initial conditions. Finally, complex analysis looks at the
properties of function with complex numbers.
This brings us to APPLIED MATHEMATICS. At this point it
is worth mentioning that everything here is a lot of more
interrelated than I have drawn. In reality this map should look
like more of a web tying together all the different subjects but
you can do so much on a two dimensional plane so I have laid
them out as best I can. Okey we'll start with physics, which
uses just about everything on the left hand side to some
degree. Mathematical and theoretical physics has a very close
relationship with pure maths. Mathematics is also used in the
other natural sciences with mathematical chemistry and
biomathematics which look at loads of stuff from modelling
molecules to evolutionary biology. Mathematics is also used
extensively in engineering, building things has taken a lot of
maths since Egyptian and Babylonian times. Very complex
electrical systems like aeroplanes or the power grid use
methods in dynamical systems called control theory. Numerical
analysis is a mathematical tool commonly used in places where
the mathematics becomes too complex to solve completely. So
instead you use lots of simple approximations and combine
them all together to get good approximate answers. For
example if you put a circle inside a square, throw darts at it,

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and them compare the number fo darts in the circle ans square
portions, you can approximate the value of pi. But in the real
world numerical analysis is done on huge computers. Game
theory looks at the best choices are given a set of rules and
rational players and it's used in economics when the players
can be intelligent, but not always, and other ares like
psychology, and biology. probability is the study of random
events like coin tosses or dice or humans, and statistics is the
study of large collections of random processes or the
organization and analysis of data. This is obviously related to
mathematical finance where you want model financial systems
and get an edge to win all those fat stacks. Related to this
optimisation, where you are trying to calculate the best choice
amongst a set of many different options or constraints, which
you can normally visualise as trying to find the highest or
lowest point of a function. Optimisation problems ore second
nature to us humans, we do them all times: trying to get the
best value for money, trying to maximise our happiness in some
way. Another area that is very deeply related to pure
mathematics is computer science, and the rules of computer
science were actually derived in pure maths and is another
example of something that was worked out way before
programmable computers were built. Machine learning: the
creation of intelligent computer systems uses many areas in
mathematics like linear algebra, optimisation, dynamical
systems and probability. And finally the theory of cryptography
is very important to computation and uses a lot of pure maths
like combinatorics and number theory.
So that covers the main section of pure and applied
mathematics, but I can't end without looking at the foundations
of mathematics. this area tries to work out at the properties of
mathematics itself, and asks what the basis of all the rules of
mathematics is. Is there a complete set of fundamental rules,
called axioms, which all of mathematics comes from? And can
we prove that it is all consistent with itself? Mathematical logic,
set theory and category theory try to answer this and a famous
result in mathematical logic are Gödel's incompleteness
theorems which, for most people, means that Mathematics does
not have a complete and consistent set of axioms, which mean

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that it is all kinda made up by us humans. Which is weird seeing
as mathematics explains so much stuff in the Universe so well.
Why would a thing made up by humans be able to do that? That
is a deep mystery right there. Also we have the theory of
computation which looks at different models of computing and
how efficiently they can solve problems and contains
complexity theory which looks at what is and isn't computable
and how much memory and time you would need, which , for
most interesting problems, is an insane amount.
Ending
So that is the map of mathematics. Now the thing I have loved
most about learning maths is that feeling you get where
something that seemed so confusing finally clicks in your brain
and everything makes sense: like an epiphany moment, kind of
like seeing through the matrix. In fact some of my most
satisfying intellectual moments have been understanding some
part of mathematics and then feeling like I had a glimpse at the
fundamental nature of the Universe in all of its symmetrical
wonder. It's great, I love it.
Making a map of mathematics was the most popular request I
got, which I was really happy about because I love maths and
its great to see so much interest in it. So I hope you enjoyed it.
Obviously there is only so much I can get into this timeframe,
but hopefully I have done the subject justice and you found it
useful. So there will be more videos coming from me soon
here's all the regular things and it was my pleasure se you next
time.
Auguste Pierre BAZONGO

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