The sum of human emotion

Anger, relief and disappointment - that's what sums can do

Tears, tantrums and murder. Far from being a cold and rational exercise, maths can provoke the full range of human emotions, explains Professor Ian Stewart.

In these days when wearing your heart on your sleeve is seen as qualifying you to be a true human being, rather than some robotic control freak, scientists and mathematicians are often viewed as being far too rational to be truly human.

Especially mathematicians, who spend all their days doing boring sums in some remote world of the intellect.

Some news, guys: it's not true.

Not just that we don't spend our time doing sums, but also we possess entirely normal human emotions - and express them.

Agreed, mathematicians are seldom seen bursting into tears or shouting in the streets, but that's mostly because mathematicians are seldom seen. Or, more to the point, seldom noticed, because there are hundreds of thousands of mathematically qualified people in British society, working in a huge range of jobs.

Shouting matches

And it's true that the way mathematics is usually presented strips out the emotional element - but the same goes for banking, architecture, whatever.

Anyone who has ever been to a mathematics conference, or sat in a mathematics department common room, notices very quickly that not only are mathematicians emotionally committed to their subject, but the emotions often run high. Shouting matches are not unusual.

The only time mathematics has driven me to tears was when I was 10

There is an important difference, however: when two mathematicians are arguing at the tops of their voices, eventually one of them says: "Oops, sorry, I've just seen why you're right." And the two are once more the best of friends and go off to the pub together.

One of the great emotional TV moments for mathematics was John Lynch's wonderful programme about Andrew Wiles's solution to Fermat's Lat Theorem, a famous problem that had baffled mathematicians for 350 years.

Relating how his epoch-making solution very nearly collapsed because of a logical error, Wiles is on the verge of tears. The entire programme shows how committed mathematicians are to their research; how solving a problem becomes a kind of personal quest.

Dorothy Parker once said that the movie actress Katharine Hepburn ran "the gamut of emotions from A to B". Mathematicians may not quite manage A to Z, but they get a good way into the alphabet - joy, sadness, a sense of beauty, anger, relief, worry, disappointment.

Hold back the tears

Even a casual glance at the lives of some of the subject's greats should dispel the notion of mathematicians as ultra-rational calculating machines. Leopold Kronecker's dislike of Georg Cantor's new theory of infinite numbers drove Cantor to a nervous breakdown.