I miss walking through the halls of Quest on the first couple of days of classes, catching up with the returning students. There’s such an energy and community there that I can’t wait to return to!
– Glen Van Brummelen
Quest’s Dr. Glen Van Brummelen is on sabbatical at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where Albert Einstein and legendary mathematician Kurt Gödel worked. Currently, Freeman Dyson (at age 95) and Robert Langlands are there too. Born and raised in British Columbia, Langlands is one of the most famous mathematicians alive today and founder of the Langlands program.
What are you working on right now?
I’m studying the work of 15th century astronomer Giovanni Bianchini, especially his theories on locating stars and planets in the celestial sphere. Bianchini has been mostly forgotten by historians in the last century, but was once famous enough to have a crater on the moon named after him. The work I’m studying corrected an error in stellar coordinate calculations that had gone unnoticed for 400 years. His solution contained a mathematical seed that grew eventually into the tangent function that we learn today in trigonometry. He also was using the decimal point, 150 years before the textbooks say it was invented!
Have you learned anything unexpected through your work?
It was rather jaw-dropping a couple of months ago, when I realized that Bianchini was using decimal fractional notation. I’m currently exploring what might have been his source of inspiration.
What’s next for you?
Wandering the hallways of the Institute for Advanced Study, dreaming of medieval celestial coordinates while trying not to notice that I just walked past Einstein’s office!
Quest misses you! When do you come back?
I’ll return to the classroom in September 2020, but I’ll return to Squamish in mid-April.
I miss walking through the halls of Quest on the first couple of days of classes, catching up with the returning students. There’s such an energy and community there that I can’t wait to return to!