carlo angiuli (blog)

As I may have mentioned before, I’m in Douglas Hofstadter’s course titled “Group Theory and Galois Theory Visualized.” We’ve been talking a lot about the beauty of mathematics — a slightly strange concept which mathematicians universally acknowledge but cannot quite quantify.

I’ve touched on this subject before — what is beauty (or perhaps, elegance) in mathematics? Last time I addressed it, I concluded that elegance, to me, is a high results to complexity ratio. I gave the example of Euler’s formula, which I find incredibly simple but deep. Beauty is about the insightfulness and depth of results, not just the usefulness.

(Example from group theory: the classification of finite simple groups, as a single corpus, is neither insightful nor deep nor useful! And it’s certainly one of the ugliest — and longest — proofs out there! Not that there aren’t good moments. It’s just kind of silly to represent the whole thing as a “proof.”)

But I’m mostly commenting again on mathematical beauty because of a comment Hofstadter made about beauty in general — what is found beautiful and by whom? (After all, most people don’t find math beautiful at all!)

He noted that, while people claim “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” there’s clearly some sort of standard for beauty. After all, if there weren’t, why would we have art museums filled with the most “beautiful” art? It does, however, take a special sort of person to enjoy the sort of beauty that math offers. Though, in that regard, math isn’t unlike most other activities — after all, why do marathoners want to run 26 miles for pleasure? It’s just that, as Hofstadter points out, enjoying mathematics requires somebody who wants instead to… “run a matharon,” so to speak.

Have I mentioned that I love puns?

Yesterday, Indiana University’s Quizbowl Club attended its first ever quizbowl tournament, the 2008 Matt Cvijanovich Memorial Novice Tournament at the University of Illinois. Seven teams came, including a team from Lawrence “University” headed by my friend and occasional nemesis, Greg Peterson. (If that name is familiar to you, perhaps that’s because last summer, he placed second on the Jeopardy! Teen Tournament.)

We, too, placed second yesterday, behind Lawrence. After a full round-robin with all seven teams, we were 4-2 and entered the top playoff bracket as the third-place team. After another round-robin between the top four teams (Lawrence, Chicago A, Indiana, and Northwestern) we ended 6-3, in second place to Lawrence’s 7-2.

We then entered an advantaged final against Lawrence, in which we had to win two games or they had to win one. Lawrence’s only two losses during the day had been to us, but we lost to them 245-200 in the first final game.

We also came in second to Lawrence in virtually every statistic: points per game, margin of victory, tossups, negs (hah!), bonus points, and bonus conversion. Greg was the high-scorer, I was fifth, and Nick was seventh.

I was very pleased with how we did. Despite the fact that nobody on our team had played competitive quizbowl in the past nine months (or longer), we managed to beat many teams that have been playing a lot this year, especially Lawrence. Also, given that it was also everyone’s first foray into college quizbowl, I’m pleased that we not only did well, but actually knew stuff! The college game, even at the lowest levels, covers vast amounts of knowledge that high school never touched, and we showed we knew enough of it.

Nick and I are used to working together and know exactly what each other has to offer, but Luke and Alex showed they could contribute a lot to our team, too. Alex, in particular, comes from a very different quizbowl tradition than the other three of us do, and he put up a solid 75 points over the course of the day.

We did realize that there are certain things we don’t know much about–like anything related to anthropology–so we’ll certainly focus on those things for next year. I also look forward to getting more people interested in the team (sign up for our intramural tournament!) and know of at least one person who will be attending Indiana next year and would be a great help to our team.