Timothy Gowers: how pure maths underpins the modern world

Cambridge professor Timothy Gowers spoke to Rachel Cunliffe in the New Statesman about how the high-tech breakthroughs that excite politicians – in AI, robotics, biotech – are only possible thanks to the mathematical research that took place years or even decades earlier.

Once you start looking for the impact of pure maths, you find it everywhere. It’s behind the development of public key cryptography – the approach to encryption which enables everything from WhatsApp messages to digital payments. And anyone who has relied on Zoom or Skype should be grateful to the mathematicians who laid the groundwork for the methods of image compression that make video calls possible.

One of Gowers’ favourite examples is how work on “compressed sensing” was able to vastly speed up the calculations which turn the data from an MRI scan into a cross-sectional image that can be analysed. By dramatically reducing the time it was necessary to spend inside the scanner, he said, it has “saved children’s lives” (children finding it notoriously difficult to stay still for long).

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