Golf and mathematics aren
’t normally found in the same sentence, unless you are John Fry,
who has a passion for both. In recent months Fry’s problems with
the city planning department and environmentalists over his 18-hole
golf course at the old Hill Country site on Foothill Avenue have
shown him wearing the black hat o
f a semi-villain. But Fry has also earned the white hat of a
hero.
Golf and mathematics aren’t normally found in the same sentence, unless you are John Fry, who has a passion for both.
In recent months Fry’s problems with the city planning department and environmentalists over his 18-hole golf course at the old Hill Country site on Foothill Avenue have shown him wearing the black hat of a semi-villain. But Fry has also earned the white hat of a hero.
In 1994 he, along with fellow golf and math enthusiast Steve Sorenson, founded the American Institute of Mathematics that, according to Executive Director Brian Conrey, represents an entirely new way of approaching mathematical questions.
“John and Steve wanted to inject the team approach,” Conrey said recently. Instead of mathematicians holing up in their universities and working out solutions alone – the traditional way – Fry’s idea was to bring a hand-picked group together in one room for a week or so and work on the problem together, in a kind of focus workshop.
Wanting to improve upon another scenario of five or six people working together over five to six months, Conrey said Fry “dreamed up a mechanism where it would work with 30 people over one week.”
The AIM website describes its workshop model as emphasizing “a specific mathematical goal, such as making progress on a significant unsolved problem, understanding the proof of an important new result, or examining the convergence of two distinct areas of mathematics.”
“We pick topics about to take off that just need a little help,” Conrey said.
At the workshops, 30 or so men and women from the United States and around the world hear the problem outlined. They discuss, break up into smaller groups, then return and bat ideas around some more in an informal setting.
Conrey said what is particularly effective is bringing together people from different disciplines: biologists and mathematicians for example, to work on a DNA issue. Varied participants add new dimensions, perspectives and resources from which to find solutions.
“They can connect the dots better working together,” Conrey said. Highly important though, is that they first establish a common language.
“We know how to work with small groups,” said David Farmer, another graduate mathematician from Oklahoma State University where Conrey was head of the math department from 1991-97. “Breaking up into discussion groups and then sharing – everyone benefits.”
Conrey said that frequently research papers are written based on a workshop’s results; a further result, Conrey said, is the satisfaction Fry gets from the Institute’s contributions to the science.
The two men met while both were math students at Santa Clara University but while Conrey went on to graduate school and the academic life, Fry decided to go into the family business – grocery stores that morphed into the enormously successful Fry’s Electronics.
Conrey and his second in command, Helen Moore, are helped out by Farmer, director of web programming. The site’s interface was set up in its current efficient style over the summer by San Martin’s Ross Richardson, a Bellarmine and Harvey Mudd graduate, now a first year graduate student in math at U.C. San Diego.
Farmer showed off the website full of ideas, contacts, schedules of upcoming workshops, workshops forming and problems needing solutions. The site attracts the mathematically inclined and allows the Institute’s small staff meet its purpose.
Conrey, Moore and Farmer are particular about which problems to build workshops around.
“It must be important,” Farmer said.
“It must be beautiful,” said Conrey. “Mathematicians won’t work on it if its not attractive. Lots of mathematicians are only interested in abstract problems, It’s all going to be used, sometime, somehow.”
As examples of combining disciplines, two upcoming workshops are entitled “Amoebas and tropical geometry” and “L2 harmonic forms in geometry and string theory.” In June a workshop focused on “Geometric models of biological phenomena.” Function and beauty.
Mathematicians have insisted for decades that math is fascinating, intriguing and fun. That it is also beautiful is a concept new to the uninitiated.
AIM workshops bring together a global range of professionals, from graduate students to professors with worldwide reputations. A workshop in early September was graced by the presence of Mike Freedman, a Fields Medal winner.
Conrey explained that, since there is no Nobel Prize for mathematics, the Fields Medal bestows that highest honor.
Freedman is best known for his solution of the age-old Poincaré conjecture in four dimensions, though during the workshop he was engaging and involved as the university professor he used to be.
Moore, who cringes visibly when mentioning that only 15 percent of people in mathematics are women, goes to great lengths to encourage them to take part in AIM workshops.
She also has her eye on the younger generation and is always available to describe the joys of math to young women and girls, trying to entice them to the profession.
Besides major, ongoing support from John Fry, Conrey said, the Institute has received a substantial grant from the National Science Foundation, (one of 19 AIM has received) that will allow The Institute to offer more workshops reaching for more solutions.
The Institute is now in Palo Alto but intends to move to the Foothill Avenue site once the old Flying Lady Restaurant is remodeled into a conference center. At that point, Fry’s two passions will sit together and enrich each other; golf and mathematics will no longer be from different worlds.
The Institute – and Fry – Conrey said, are committed to preserving the historical record of mathematics, too, and to that end have bought the mathematical card catalogue from Cornell University and continues to build its collection.
Keith Dennis, a professor at Cornell, member of AIM’s board of directors and chair of the library board, is interested in the history of math himself, Conrey said. Dennis is former chief editor of Math Reviews, a branch of the American Mathematics Society responsible for obtaining and publishing a review of each math paper written. He has donated books and journals and, Conrey said, has been a helpful resource.
The Palo Alto center, located next to the original Fry’s Electronics store, is now lined with book shelves housing dozens of journals and historical math books and thousands of reprints collected in hundreds of black loose-leaf notebooks. Each notebook is devoted to the published work of a particular mathematician, some of whom were in the building attending the September workshop.
The effort to expand the library has been successful.
In a very few years the Institute went from less than two linear feet of journals and math papers.
“By 2000 we had 50,000 (papers, not feet),” Conrey said.
Conrey and Fry both live in Morgan Hill; Moore has said she looks forward to moving to town with the Math Institute, whenever that happens. She intends to work with Conrey in the Morgan Hill schools’ Math Counts program when she too comes to town.
Moore will bring her own ideas, too, since she is a regular participant in science and math camps for girls sponsored by former astronaut Sally Ride and the American Association of University Women.
Even though it is still in Palo Alto, the Institute acknowledges its connection to Morgan Hill. In the break room, ready for after-workshop relaxation, are rows of beers from El Toro Brewing Company and wines from Guglielmo and Solis wineries.
And in a hallway near the Institute’s front door is a set of architect’s drawings of the Flying Lady turned into a state-of-the art conference center – only a putt away from the greens.
More about the nonprofit AIM and its past and upcoming workshops, can be found at www.aimath.org
