If we could affix a red card with the words “attention: contains mathematics” on the objects in the environment that surrounds us (Ian Stewart, How beautiful mathematics is, 2006) we would soon realize how fundamental it is for understanding and the functioning of the world we live in. Yet, why in someone’s imagination is it associated with an arid and repelling matter? We think a lot is linked to how it is told. We need to recover the pleasure of reading it, of reading its events and of meeting, through biographies, the great and less great who have traced its history, in time and space. Mathematics, in fact, is not static, but is a living body that continues to evolve today, with new discoveries constantly being made in fields such as artificial intelligence, quantum cryptography and game theory.

Our journey will start from the Egyptians, from the Babylonians to reach ancient Greece with Pythagoras, Archimedes and Euclid, whose extraordinary work on geometry, the “Elements”, influenced mathematics for centuries. We will fly over India, China and the Islamic world: the creation of zero and negative numbers, the discovery of mathematical formulas for calculating the circumference of the Earth and the creation of algorithms used in cryptography.
We will return to Europe to discover Fibonacci, perspective and the astronomical revolution, Galileo, Newton, Klein, Cantor and Hilbert, in a constant interweaving between the events of peoples and philosophical and mathematical thought.
At least forty students from the Pacinotti Scientific High School involved as scientific animators during the Festival will contribute to the journey.
The teachers: M.G. Collu, A. Fanuli, S. Ricci and P. Sitzia