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发帖数: 72 | 1 By Patrick Cole
Nov. 1 (Bloomberg) -- As a devout numbers geek, Glen
Whitney was bothered that the cultural landscape offered no
museum celebrating the field of mathematics.
So he left his job as an algorithms specialist and manager
at Renaissance Technologies LLC, a quantitative hedge fund
started by Jim Simons, and created the nonprofit Museum of
Mathematics.
This year, he found a 19,000-square-foot space on East 26th
Street in Manhattan and plans to open the doors in 2012.
“I started this museum because I wanted people to have a
chance to see the beauty, excitement and wonder of
mathematics,” said Whitney, 42, speaking in the empty space
under construction.
When it opens, MoMath won’t display slide rules or other
relics initially. It will offer math experiences for visitors of
all ages: logic puzzles and games like Rubik’s Cube and a hyper
hyperboloid, a sculpture made of lines of red thread that create
the illusion of being in a curved cage of strings. One planned
exhibit features a square-wheeled tricycle that can ride on a
special path as smoothly as one with round wheels.
Whitney, the museum’s executive director, is especially
targeting children in grades 4 through 8, yet he hopes their
parents and his peers from the hedge-fund industry will stop in
and even make a donation.
“We need an institution like a Museum of Mathematics so
people are aware of it and better serve their roles in society,
whether it’s understanding a budget or even just the lottery,”
Whitney said. “Right now, I think the lotteries are a tax on
the mathematically illiterate, and people need to understand the
risks they’re taking.”
Google, Sloan Help
Whitney has raised about $22 million from some 300 donors
such as Google Inc., the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and a
charity founded by Simons. Whitney hopes to eventually create a
museum national in scope with a broad donor base.
Born in Rahway, New Jersey, and raised in nearby Linden,
Whitney got hooked on numbers when his parents sent him to a
math camp at Ohio State University in his early teens.
“While going through school, math wasn’t something that
excited me,” he said. “Kids are told, ‘Here’s something you’ve
got to learn for this test, and you’ll never need it again.’”
After studying math at Harvard, he earned a Ph.D. at the
University of California, Los Angeles. He took a teaching job at
the University of Michigan before joining Renaissance
Technologies.
He then discovered the Goudreau Museum of Mathematics in
Art and Science in New Hyde Park, New York, which closed a few
years ago.
“It had stayed the same size, it was only open by
appointment for 20 years. So I wanted to create an institution
that could address the broader cultural problems with
mathematics,” he said. “People don’t see math as something
exciting that they should go into as part of their careers.” |
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