In Memoriam- Don Davis

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 I have had the incredible opportunity to work with some of the leading mathematicians of my generation. Nobel Laureate Dr. Jerome Karle, my supervisor at NRL, Dr. John Konnert, co-founder of RPG Diffusor Systems and Dr. Trevor Cox, my co-author of reference acoustical books. I have always been fascinated with mathematics, because it has been one of my most difficult subjects. I struggled with it in high school. In college and grad school, I took all of the required math courses and achieved good grades, but I always felt like I was speaking a foreign language, rather than developing the comfort and fluidity of speaking one’s native tongue.
 

It seemed incredible that a mathematician could work from basic principles, sometimes even inventing new math, to describe the physical world and the laws of nature. Eugene Wigner described this in his publication “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”. John Tierney, a science writer for the New York Times, once wrote about mathematicians, “No matter how hard the practitioners of mathematics try to deliberately ignore the physical world, they consistently produce the best tools for understanding it”. The Greeks decide to study a strange curve called an ellipse and 2000 years later Kepler discovers it describes the orbits of the planets. In 1854 Bernhard Riemann conjectured it was not possible to draw two parallel lines ad infinitum and described curved space. 60 years later, Einstein announced that curved space-time was the shape of the universe. In the 19thcentury in Gottingen, Germany, Carl Friedrich Gauss discovered quadratic residue sequences and much more with no application in mind. In 1975 Manfred Schroeder used these sequences to uniformly diffuse soundwaves. The discovery of the Quark also intrigued me. Dr. Murray Gell-Mann working at Cal Tech, down the hall from Richard Feynman (both New Yorkers!), came to the mathematical conclusion that there must be an elemental particle, yet undiscovered, which he called the Quark, first used in Finnegan’s Wake, by James Joyce. One day he received a call from the Stanford Linear Accelerator describing a new particle they discovered. Upon further investigation, it turned out to be the Quark! He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1969. More recently Peter Higgs postulated from pure mathematics that the Standard Model required a force particle, which was called the Higgs Boson or GOD particle. Miraculously in 2012 it was detected at the LHC at 125 GeV. This unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics never ceased to amaze me!