Interviewemployed who would otherwise have had problems findinga job. How did you manage it?First of all, I never had the ambition of being a directorand I got into this position by sheer coincidence of circumstances.I took it as a service to my “maternal” institution.The times were not easy indeed. My principal goalwas to keep a quiet atmosphere in the institute, rathercalm down than provoke conflicts. Somehow, it worked.You spent a lot of effort and energy for the benefit ofthe Union of Czech Mathematicians and Physicists andalso of the EMS. What are your impressions about theorigins and the current state of the EMS?I was a deputy of the union at the first informal meetingdedicated to establishing a European organisationof mathematicians, held in 1978 in Helsinki. Hospitalityand engagement of Finnish mathematicians were veryimportant for the beginning of the EMS. The EMS alsoprobably wouldn’t exist without the effort of Sir MichaelAtiyah and later of Professor Friedrich Hirzebruch. TheCzech union contributed quite significantly, too. I was intensivelyworking in the Extended Preliminary Committeeof the EMS till 1992. The current publication activityof the EMS is formidable. My overall impression is thatthe original goal of establishing an analogue of the AMShas not been met yet.You had a decisive impact on the fruitful long-termcollaboration of Czech mathematicians with expertsfrom abroad. Did your personal friendship with foreignmathematicians play a role here?Personal contacts have always been very important. Anothersignificant parameter is the location. For example,the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena was easy to travelto, and moreover it is not far from Prague. Collaborationwith the Soviet Union was also possible throughvarious mutual agreements. Contacts with the Royal Societyin the UK were more difficult to maintain, but possible.After 1990, everything became easy. I always madesome original contacts and my younger colleagues couldthen take advantage of them. An important factor wasthe organisation of conferences in our country since newcontacts were built there.her maximum support. I believe that she also has understandingfor my mathematics. I appreciate that she accompaniesme during my travels if circumstances allow.She is however not always delighted by me leaving heron her own during conference talks.What do you like most and what do you like least aboutbeing a mathematician?I like the life in general and the life of a mathematicianin particular. What I do not like is the sometimes negativeattitude of the public towards mathematics. Too oftenwe hear celebrities emphasising that they never likedmathematics, that they have never been capable of understandingit. Mathematics deserves better!Luboš Pick is a professor of mathematicalanalysis at Charles University in Prague,Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. Hestudied at Charles University in Pragueand obtained a PhD at the MathematicalInstitute of the Czechoslovak Academy ofSciences in 1990. In the period 1991–1994he was employed by the University of Wales in Cardiff,UK. He has written one monograph and over 60 researchpapers in the theory of function spaces. In his free timehe translates books from English to Czech and plays bassguitar in several rock and folk bands.The first Spring School on Nonlinear Analysis, FunctionSpaces and Applications (NAFSA) was organised in1978; the 10th one is just coming. How was the organisationin times of no email, internet or cell phones?NAFSA schools were an offspring of the Pilsen seminars.Conditions for the organising work were of course verydifferent to the current ones. But we were able to manageit even with quite modest means such as the usualmail. And hard conditions had a good impact on the integrityof our team.Your wife is a quite well-known translator from Germanand other languages. What is family life like fortwo professionals so deeply engaged in their work?We have been together for over 55 years. I respect hertranslating job very much and I have always tried to give46 EMS Newsletter June 2014
Raising Public AwarenessBuffon: Did He Actually Throw Sticks?Ehrhard Behrends (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany) and Jorge Buescu (Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal)George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788) isfamous for the following “experiment”:Find a room with a plank floor, and denote the widthof the planks by a. You will need a stick or some similarlyshaped object, whose length 2r must be less thana. This condition guarantees that the stick will crossthe edge of at most one plank when it is tossed onthe floor.today in the fact that in the fifth arrondissement, at thesouthern border of the Jardin des Plantes, near the JussieuCampus, there is to be found a Rue Buffon.La Rue Buffon.Buffon and the “needle experiment.”The probability P that such an event occurs (thatis, that the stick does not end up entirely on a singleplank) is then 4r/(pa). This formula contains themathematical constant p, and we have, therefore, theopportunity of computing this number “experimentally.”It will, to be sure, be necessary to throw thestick “very often,” a number of times that we shall denoteby n. If the stick lies across two boards k timesout of the n throws, then according to the law of largenumbers, k/n should be a good approximation of P,and by solving the equation P = 4r/(p a) for p, we willhave found a good approximation of p.(Of course, instead of planks and sticks, one could simplyuse paper, along with needles or matches; the onlyrequirement is that the distance between the lines on thepaper be large enough.)It is generally accepted that Buffon’s experiment representsthe first Monte Carlo experiment in the history ofmathematics, namely an experiment in which a randommethod is used to solve a problem at least approximately.Such methods can be used, for example, to compute definiteintegrals over multidimensional domains of definitionand solve numerous counting problems.Buffon’s family became wealthy through an inheritance,and so in his youth, Buffon became financially independent.Like many of his contemporaries, he becamefascinated by the rapidly developing natural sciences. Indeed,he was interested in everything. His studies led toa planned fifty-volume encyclopaedia Histoire naturelle,générale et particulière, thirty-six volumes of which werepublished. From 1739 on, he served as the administratorof the royal garden in Paris (“Jardin Royal,” today“Jardin des Plantes”). An echo of his service can be seenThere were plans for this street to play an important rolein November 2013 as part of a campaign for the popularizationof mathematics. The rpa committee (rpa = “raisingpublic awareness”) of the European Mathematical Society(EMS) met that month in Paris, and someone cameup with the idea of “reconstructing” the Buffon experimentin the Rue Buffon. The conditions could not havebeen more propitious, for the relevant mathematics canbe easily understood by a lay audience (while at the sametime being not at all trivial), and with a bit of luck andprofessional preparation, one could hope for good coveragein the media and to score a triumph for the popularizationof mathematics.But the project was cancelled. When some committeemembers got in touch with the Parisian historian ofmathematics Bernard Bru to learn more about the historicaldetails, they learned that there exists no historicalevidence that Buffon saw any relationship between histheoretical deliberations and a calculation to approximatethe value of p, nor whether his famous “experiment”was in fact ever carried out. We have here, then,an interesting example of the fact that historical truthand “generally accepted knowledge” need have little relationshipto each other. Let us now look more closely atthis discrepancy between fact and supposition.We begin with facts that are not in dispute.1. In 1733, Buffon submitted an article to the Royal Academyof Sciences (of which he became a member in 1734)in which he correctly calculated the probability that arandomly tossed stick of length 2r would intersect one ofseveral parallel lines an equal distance a apart (providedthat 2r < a):Sur un plancher qui n’est formé que de plancheségales & parallèles, on jette une Baguette d’une certainelongueur, & qu’on suppose sans largeur. Quandtombera-t-elle sur une seule planche? 1 (See [2])1Freely translated: “One tosses a stick of a certain length and ofnegligible thickness onto a floor consisting of parallel boardsof equal width. When will it fall on only a single board?EMS Newsletter June 2014 47