As the penultimate event of the Light in Winter Festival, Prof. Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University gave a lecture on Sunday entitled “Is God a Mathematician?” to a packed Statler Auditorium.

While the catchy title served to attract the audience’s interest, the crux of Livio’s lecture was to examine the uncanny power of mathematics in describing the physical world and the implications of such a power.

“How is it possible that mathematics, a product of human thought that is independent of experience, fits so excellently the objects of physical reality?” he asked, quoting the famous Albert Einstein.

To explore this point, Livio used the predictive ability of Newton’s inverse law of gravitation — derived from prior observations of Johannes Kepler — as an example. While Kepler’s observations of the movements of the planet were within four percent accuracy, the law was accurate to 56 microns (millionth of a meter). In essence, the law was more accurate than the observations from which it is derived.

Livio further divided the ability of mathematics to describe the physical world into two classes: “active” and “passive” effectiveness. Often, he explained, mathematical advancements take place without any particular application in mind, only to define physical phenomena decades or centuries later. He called this kind of development, passive effectiveness.

Active effectiveness, on the other hand, is mathematics developed for the express purpose of describing a particular physical phenomenon. An example of passive effectiveness is the development of knot theory. Drafted by Lord Kelvin to represent atoms comprised of various “knots of aether,” the knot model was later dropped and readopted by biologists to describe the double-helix nature of DNA.

Livio went on to mention the debate over whether mathematics is an invention of the human brain or an independent entity awaiting human discovery. As an example, he said that the ratio of consecutive Fibonacci numbers (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 and 21) converge to the golden ratio, 1.618.

“What guarantees that a mathematical model exists at all?” he rhetorically asked. “Absolutely nothing!” he claimed, arguing that mathematical tools were never chosen arbitrarily; rather they were carefully picked because they work.

On attendance, was John Gurche, artist-in-residence at the Museum of the Earth. Gurche said that he enjoyed the lecture, and went on to commend Carl Sagan’s assertion that if extraterrestrial organisms did exist, they would speak the language of mathematics, but cautioned that he would have to read Livio’s book “Is God A Mathematician?” to fully understand the topic in question.

Gurche’s twelve-year old son also attended. The boy described the lecture as utterly “dizzying.”