Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Is it because of poor math ability that the math exam is bad? The story of a romantic Frenchman will dispel your doubts.

He loved math all his life and was good at solving math problems, but he regarded exams as a lifelong nightmare. He was Charles Charles Hermite, a mathematician who had failed five math exams.

Charles Hermit received an enlightening education from his parents. Due to the needs of business development, in 1829, Hermit and his family moved to Nancy. Here, because business activities take up almost all the parents' time, they send several children to Nansi public middle school as boarders.

Hermit has been a problem student since childhood, and he likes to argue with teachers in class, especially some basic questions. He thinks: learning is like the sea, exams are like fish hooks, the teacher hangs fish on fish hooks, how can fish learn to swim in the sea? Although he had attainments in mathematics since childhood, he always failed the exam. every time the teacher saw that he did not do well in the exam, he hit him on the foot with a stick of wood. "the textbook is a pool of smelly water and a pile of rubbish," he added. People who do well in math are people with second-rate minds because they only know how to carry garbage. "

You say that you always like to disapprove of the teacher when you fail. Can you avoid the teacher's "beating"? He likes to spend time reading the original works of mathematical masters such as Newton and Gauss, where he finds "the beauty of mathematics and drinks the source of mathematical excitement."

He began to take the entrance examination of the Paris Institute of Engineering and Technology at the age of 18 and barely passed the last place for the fifth time, each time because he failed the math exam. It was not easy to get in, but things changed again a year later, this time not because of his math grades, but because he was born with a handicapped right foot and needed to walk on crutches. The education authorities ordered that "the disabled are not allowed to enter the engineering department," and Hermit was forced to transfer to the literature department, where mathematics was not difficult to learn, but he still failed.

Interestingly, during this period, he published "thinking about the solution of quintic equations" in the French mathematical research journal Journal of Pure Mathematics and Applied Mathematics. In history, Greek mathematicians discovered the solutions of primary and quadratic equations. after that, mathematicians thought hard about the solution of more than the fourth equation to the nth power, but now it is a student of the literature department who proposed the solution. I can hardly imagine the shock of other mathematicians at that time.

At the age of 24, with the help of his friend Bertram, Hermit finally graduated with marginal grades, but because he couldn't cope with the exams, he couldn't find a job, so he had to find a school to be an assistant in correcting students' homework.

He has been working as a teaching assistant for 25 years. During this period, he published "Algebraic continued fraction Theory", "function Theory" and "equation Theory". Although he is already famous all over the world and is far more famous than many university professors, Hermit can only continue to correct his students' homework because he can't take exams.

Of course, Hermit's achievements are more than those mentioned above. Students majoring in science and engineering should have been exposed to "matrix theory" and then "linear algebra". Then you should be very familiar with Hermitian matrices and Hermitian determinants.

Yes, Hermione is Hermit. Hermitian matrix is also called "Hermitian matrix". Of course, there are not only Hermitian concepts named after Hermitian, but also Hermitian polynomial Hermitian canonical form, Hermitian operator, and cubic Hermitian splines.

Not only Hermitian polynomials are used in the expression of Edgeworth series in probability theory, but also in combinatorial mathematics, Hermitian polynomials are still the solution of Appel equation. Hermitian polynomials also give the eigenstates of quantum harmonic oscillators. Does it sound awesome?

In addition, everyone in high school should have learned the ellipse problem of analytic geometry, and the simplest solution of the unary quadratic equation, and at the top of the sky will find out the monotonicity of any cubic function, but Hermit, as a student who failed in high school mathematics, the "boy" who still failed in college mathematics used the elliptic module function to obtain a general method for solving quintic equations, and in 1873 he was the first to prove that the bottom e of the natural logarithm is a transcendental number. Won an unexpected victory in the stubborn e.

Hermit has also studied classical mathematical analysis, the theory of complex functions, the theory of differential equations and geometry. In addition to Hermitian polynomials, there are many mathematical concepts and theorems, such as matrices, operators, tensors, spaces, clusters, etc., which are also named after Hermitian.

I have to say, he is really a clear stream of learning to dominate the world. later, the famous theorem that π is a transcendental number, the prover Ferdinand von Linderman used his method to solve the problem of "turning a circle into a square", which is quite powerful.

Such a powerful mathematician worked as a teaching assistant for more than 20 years, correcting homework until the University of Paris, 49, hired him as a professor because of his fame. Over the next 25 years, almost all of the great mathematicians in France came from him, such as the famous "Poincare" and "Adama".

Poincare recalled his teacher: he never evokes a concrete image, but you soon find that the most abstract nature is like a living creature to him. And there is a strange phenomenon in his class: only analysis, no exams. After thinking about it, the author thinks that it is normal not to take an exam. After all, Hermit's math achievement is simply ignored, but his math achievement is second to none.

Because he could not take the exam, he did not work smoothly, retook the exam many times, was despised and self-abased by others, and made his whole life mature prematurely. Elmitt was a groundbreaking genius, despite the endless suffering brought by rigid mathematics education. He failed the exam again and again, but he continued to take the exam only because he didn't want to give up maths. That's why he didn't drown himself in the long river of history.

In his early years, Hermit was called "the Young Lagrange" by the mathematics teacher Richard, and then Bell, a professor of mathematics at the California Institute of Technology, described Hermit in a review of the great men of mathematics: "the more gifted a mathematician in history, the more cynical he is, the more sarcastic his speech is. The only exception is Hermit, who has a truly perfect personality."

Photo Source: pexls the author thinks that whether it is "Young Lagrange" or a perfect personality, it is a high praise for a person or a mathematician. In his later years, Hermit wrote: the characteristics of mathematics exist in itself. He thinks that he is just a person who inadvertently discovers these characteristics. not only that, Hermit has a different view of mathematics from others. "the value of mathematics is not just for the application of life. It should not be reduced to a tool for engineering and commercial applications, and breakthroughs in mathematics still need to constantly break through the existing pattern."

Source: "Mustard Sumi: the short Story of the Great Scientist", slightly deleted by the author: some of the pictures are from the Internet, and the copyright belongs to the original author. This article comes from Wechat official account: original Reading (ID:tupydread), author: supermodel Editor: Zhang Runxin

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