Mathematician and physicist Dr John Lighton Synge describes his work.
Born in Dublin in 1897, John L Synge is the nephew of playwright John Millington Synge.
John L Synge served in a scientific capacity in the US army during World War II and went on to become Senior Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, a position from which he retired in 1972 with the title Emeritus.
Dr Synge sees himself as being somewhere between a mathematician and a physicist. Physicists describe him as a mathematician and mathematicians describe him as a physicist.
The mathematics that interests me is the mathematics that has some physical application.
Describing himself as a visualiser someone who forms a visual picture of something before he can understand it. At the age of about 14, he read a book by Francis Galton called 'The Human Faculty and Its Development'. John L Synge connected with the book immediately as it described what was going on his mind. He made diagrams of how he saw the alphabet and says that his mind still works this way to this day.
For Dr Synge, an essential feature of good mathematics is "an intrinsic beauty". He finds the beauty of mathematics in its logic and simplicity.
It is the most logical of all human activities.
He acknowledges that not all mathematics is not beautiful as it gets too complicated. If an individual can see through the complications, then they will see it as beautiful.
This episode of 'Hanly's People' was broadcast on 15 June 1987. The presenter is David Hanly.
'Hanly's People’ was a weekly programme featuring a guest in conversation with presenter David Hanly in a living-room setting for half an hour. Each guest was someone in the news, making the news, or behind the news. They were drawn from all spheres of public life, including politics and the arts. ‘Hanly’s People’ was first broadcast on 6 October 1986 and ended on 6 June 1991.
