中国科学院大学研究生学术英语读写教程 Unit4 Mathematics TextA 原文和翻译

中国科学院大学研究生学术英语读写教程

Unit4 Mathematics TextA 原文和翻译

Magic Numbers: Can Maths Equations Be Beautiful?
神奇数字：数学方程式可以很美丽吗？
lan Sample

1
Paul Dirac had an eye for beauty. In one essay, from May 1963, the British Nobel laureate referred to beauty nine times. It makes four appearances in four consecutive sentences. In the article, he painted a picture of how physicists saw nature. But the word beauty never defined a sunset, nor a flower, or nature in any traditional sense. Dirac was talking quantum theory and gravity. The beauty lay in the mathematics.

保罗·狄拉克对美很有眼光。在1963年5月的一篇文章中，这位英国诺贝尔奖获得者九次提到美。它在四个连续的句子中出现了四次。在这篇文章中，他描绘了物理学家如何看待自然。但“美”这个词从未定义过日落、花朵或任何传统意义上的自然。狄拉克正在谈论量子理论和引力。美在于数学。

2
What does it mean for maths to be beautiful? It is not about the appearance of the symbols on the page. That, at best, is secondary. Maths becomes beautiful through the power and elegance of its arguments and formulae; through the bridges it builds between previously unconnected worlds. When it surprises. For those who learn the language, maths has the same capacity for beauty as art, music, a full blanket of stars on the darkest night.

数学美丽意味着什么？这与页面上符号的外观无关。这充其量是次要的。数学因其论点和公式的力量和优雅而变得美丽；通过它在以前未连接的世界之间建立的桥梁。当它令人惊讶的时候。对于那些学习这门语言的人来说，数学与艺术、音乐、最黑暗的夜晚的星空一样美丽。

3
“The slow movement of the Mozart clarinet concerto is a really beautiful piece of music, but I don’t print off a page of the score and put that on my wall. It’s not about that. It’s about the music and the ideas and the emotional response,” says Vicky Neale, a mathematician at Oxford University. “It’s the same with a piece of mathematics. It’s not how it looks; it’s about the underlying thought processes.”

牛津大学数学家维姬·尼尔说：“莫扎特单簧管协奏曲的慢乐章是一首非常美丽的音乐，但我不会把乐谱打印出来放在墙上。这不是关于这个的。这是关于音乐、想法和情感反应的。”。“数学也是如此。问题不在于它看起来如何，而在于它背后的思维过程。”

4
Brain scans of mathematicians show that gazing at formulae considered beautiful by the beholder elicits activity in the same emotional region as great art and music. The more beautiful the formula, the greater the activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex. “So far as the brain is concerned, maths has beauty just like art. There is common neurophysiological ground,” says Sir Michael Atiyah, an honorary professor of mathematics at Edinburgh University.

数学家的脑部扫描显示，凝视旁观者认为美丽的公式会引发与伟大艺术和音乐相同的情感区域的活动。配方越漂亮，内侧眶额叶皮层的活性就越大