A painful assignment, a source of sustenance

Home > Opinion > Meanwhile

A painful assignment, a source of sustenance

Published: 28 Aug. 2025, 00:05

Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

Lee Woo Young

The author is an HCMC distinguished professor at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study.

When mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, often called the “prince of mathematics,” died in 1855, he left a peculiar request: He wanted a regular 17-gon inscribed on his tombstone when he died.

Gauss had solved the construction of a regular 17-sided polygon when he was just 18, cracking a problem that had eluded mathematicians for centuries. The discovery made him a prodigy. His wish to see it engraved on his tombstone reflected a lifelong attachment. Yet the request was not fulfilled. Carving such a precise figure into stone proved too difficult.

An oil painting of mathematician and philosopher Carl Friedrich Gauss by G. Biermann. [WIKIPEDIA]

The citizens of Braunschweig, his hometown in what is now Germany, took offense. Could the final wish of their most celebrated native not be honored? Seeking an alternative, they drew 17 evenly spaced points along a circle. Fearing that connecting the dots would only resemble another circle, they instead linked the points in wedge-like patterns, producing an image reminiscent of a blazing sun. The design was engraved at the base of Gauss’s statue. His wish was not fully granted, but the devotion behind the gesture was evident. Some later remarked that a formula, like the one engraved on Stephen Hawking’s memorial, might have sufficed. But the formula for the 17-gon bristles with square roots, hardly suitable for stone.

A century earlier, Basel-born Jakob Bernoulli, another renowned mathematician, had also left instructions for his tombstone. Proud of his work on the logarithmic spiral, he requested that the curve be carved into his grave marker. Instead, the sculptor mistakenly engraved an Archimedean spiral, whose arms are evenly spaced rather than increasingly wide. Today, such a mistake might warrant a refund. The sculptor, however, defended himself, insisting, “A spiral is a spiral.”

Ancient anecdotes go further. The epitaph of Diophantus, the Greek mathematician, reportedly presented a riddle in algebraic form, requiring solvers to deduce his age from the problem. Even in death, the mathematician left behind a challenge.

The theme is clear: Mathematicians, in life and after, seem unable to resist leaving assignments. Yet it raises a broader question. What would a world without assignments look like? Would life be perpetually joyful or unbearably dull?

Futurologists have warned that the end of humanity might come not through war or catastrophe but through boredom, when minds lose purpose. If so, the troublesome assignments of life — mathematical or otherwise — may be what sustain us.

This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.