FACES OF MATHEMATICS

Ed Corrigan is Professor of Mathematics at York University. His research is in mathematical physics, in the areas of classical and quantum field theories, and string theory. Corrigan's research aims at solving problems in physics by deepening our understanding of the underlying mathematics. His work involves both ideas inspired by physical systems and ideas arising in diverse areas of pure and applied mathematics.

"There's magic in there! You construct a model, which is a model quantum field theory, and you do that because there's something you want to calculate exactly, and you find that under those circumstances, there's a lot of interesting mathematics that simply comes naturally to you.

"My philosophy - well, it is not really mine, but I think it is quite a good one - is that whenever you have an interesting idea, which is mathematically interesting and has some physical intuition associated with it, even if it is not directly related to experiment at the time you think of it, if it is interesting and you wait long enough, probably there is a good chance that it will emerge because somebody will find a way to make use of it. That has happened so often that I suspect that it is quite good to do mathematical physics, in the sense of generating ideas that people can subsequently make use of, even if you're not the prime generator of the new physical ideas themselves.

"Philosophers are interested in time and they write a great many words about it. Clockmakers are interested in time, because they can use it as a vehicle for art, actually: they build beautiful cabinets and clock faces, and the mechanisms themselves have a kind of beauty. Physicists are interested in time because we live in spacetime, and everything we do involves time, and yet they don't understand it. Why does time only flow in one direction, for example? That verges on philosophy, but really it is a question in physics. To me... I'm interested in what makes the clocks tick. I'm not a philosopher, and I am not a physicist....I'm more interested in the way clocks work. It is the mechanisms that I'm interested in, and how you can do things quite elegantly sometimes."