Visible Structures in Number Theory
These are the words the great French mathematician used to describe his initial thoughts when he proved that there is a prime number greater than 11 [11, p. 76]. His final mental image he described as "... a place somehere between the confused mass and the first point". In commenting on this in his fascinating but quirky monograph, he asks "What may be the use of such a strange and cloudy imagery?". Hadamard was of the opinion that mathematical thought is visual and that words only interfered. And when he inquired into the thought processes of his most distinguished mid-century colleaugues, he discovered that most of them, in some measure, agreed (a notable exception being George Polya). For the non-professional, the idea that mathematicians "see" their ideas may be surprising. However the history of mathematics is marked by many notable developments grounded in the visual. Descartes' introduction of "cartesian" co-ordinates, for example, is arguably the most important advance in mathematics in the last millenium. It fundamentally reshaped the way mathematicians thought about mathematics, precisely because it allowed them to "see" better mathematically. Indeed, mathematicians have long been aware of the significance of visualization and made great effort to exploit it. Carl Friedrich Gauss lamented, in a letter to Heinrich Christian Schumacher, how hard it was to draw the pictures required for making accurate conjectures. Gauss, whom many consider the greatest mathematician of all time, in reference to a diagram that accompanies his first proof of the fundamental theorem of algebra, wrote