Mathematics, design, and convenience

Ben Sparks, concluding his article written for the scientific magazine Spektrum.de (link at the end of this post):

What is our lesson from all this? We often have convenience now because someone did the maths before. Thanks to them, we can now safely forget that even some of the most basic aspects of our lives are governed by numbers and their properties. But they are, and we benefit greatly from the people that have reflected upon this.

Reading this paragraph, you must be wondering what the hell he is talking about. Once you know, you may just want to skip the whole thing since the topic of the article seem incredibly dull. But trust me, you will want to read the whole thing.

I will not tell you what it is about here: you’ll have to discover it for yourself by reading the whole thing. I personally learned a lot, and I even found a new appreciation for design.

I discovered this gem of the internet via Nick Parker’s newsletter The Notices, but I cannot remember how I was encouraged to subscribe to it in the first place earlier this month; Now that I read Twitter via RSS feeds only, I can’t like tweets and reply to people, so it’s harder to keep track of who shared what.

The content of this article by Ben Sparks will definitely be discussed during my next dinner party: that’s how interesting it is. Seriously, go read it now.