Han-Bom Moon (문한봄)

Pale Blue Dot

Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of the planet Earth taken by the Voyager 1 space probe. In this photo, which was taken from 3.7 billion miles away, the Earth (the blueish-white dot on the brown band on the right) is just a pixel.

Below is an excerption from Carl Sagan’s book ‘Pale Blue Dot’. This is one of the most beautiful paragraphs in scientific writings I have ever seen. If I read his book when I was a student, perhaps I decided to be an astronomer.

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

What can one (such as myself) contribute to mathematics?

Here is a (part of) beautiful answer of Bill Thurston:

It’s not mathematics that you need to contribute to. It’s deeper than that: how might you contribute to humanity, and even deeper, to the well-being of the world, by pursuing mathematics? Such a question is not possible to answer in a purely intellectual way, because the effects of our actions go far beyond our understanding. We are deeply social and deeply instinctual animals, so much that our well-being depends on many things we do that are hard to explain in an intellectual way. That is why you do well to follow your heart and your passion. Bare reason is likely to lead you astray. None of us are smart and wise enough to figure it out intellectually.

The product of mathematics is clarity and understanding. Not theorems, by themselves. Is there, for example any real reason that even such famous results as Fermat’s Last Theorem, or the Poincaré conjecture, really matter? Their real importance is not in their specific statements, but their role in challenging our understanding, presenting challenges that led to mathematical developments that increased our understanding.

…

In short, mathematics only exists in a living community of mathematicians that spreads understanding and breaths life into ideas both old and new. The real satisfaction from mathematics is in learning from others and sharing with others. All of us have clear understanding of a few things and murky concepts of many more. There is no way to run out of ideas in need of clarification. The question of who is the first person to ever set foot on some square meter of land is really secondary. Revolutionary change does matter, but revolutions are few, and they are not self-sustaining – they depend very heavily on the community of mathematicians.

Indeed, this is the reason why I truly believe teaching mathematics is as important as studying mathematics for me.

See “On proof and progress in mathematics” written by Thurston.
Also check this post for the original question and relevant answers.

My academic genealogy

Here is a list of my academical ancestors in a chronological order.

You can find your own ancestors at http://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/.

Friedrich Leibniz (Universität Leipzig, 1622)
Jakob Thomasius (Magister der Philosophie Universität Leipzig, 1643)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (Dr. phil. Universität Leipzig, 1666)
Nicolas Malebranche
Jacob Bernoulli (Dr. hab. Sci. Universität Basel, 1684)
Johann Bernoulli (Medicinae Dr. Universität Basel, 1690, 1694)
Leonhard Euler (Ph.D. Universität Basel, 1726)
Joseph Louis Lagrange (B.A. Università di Torino, 1754)
Simeon Denis Poisson (Ph.D. École Polytechnique, 1800)
Michel Chasles (Ph.D. École Polytechnique, 1814)
H. A. Newton (B.A. Yale University, 1850)
E. H. Moore (Ph.D. Yale University, 1885)
Oswald Veblen (Ph.D. The University of Chicago, 1903)
R. L. Moore (Ph.D. The University of Chicago, 1905)
Raymond Louis Wilder (Ph.D. University of Texas at Austin, 1923)
Frank Albert Raymond (Ph.D. University of Michigan, 1958)
Ronnie Lee (Ph.D. University of Michigan, 1968)
Young-Hoon Kiem (Ph.D. Yale University, 2000)
Han-Bom Moon (Ph.D. Seoul National University, 2011)

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