Is There a Beauty in Mathematics?

“Having tasted beauty at the heart of the world, we hunger for more.” These are words from Nobel physicist Frank Wilczek in his book, A Beautiful Question. It’s a winsome, joyful meditation on the question: Do cosmic realities embody beautiful ideas? — probing the world, by way of science, as a work of art. He reminds us that time and space, mystery and order, are so much stranger and more generous than we can comprehend. He’s now written a wonderful new book, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality.

Frank Wilczek is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2004, he received the Nobel Prize in physics. His books include A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design and The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces. His new book is Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired April 28, 2016.