Freeman Dyson, the Mathematician

Abstract

The one person who comes closest to the legacy of Hermann Weyl was Freeman Dyson, who contributed enormously to both Physics and Mathematics. His books and talks are testaments to his prolificity in writing widely on the world at large and on science and mathematics in particular. To name a few of his books, he has (talked and) written on ‘Bombs and Poetry’, ‘Imagined Worlds’, ‘Origins of Life’ and ‘Birds and Frogs’. Remarkably, Dyson contributed handsomely to what is termed ‘pure mathematics’. One would expect a physicist-mathematician to interest himself mainly in problems of an ‘applied’ nature. Here, we take a necessarily brief peek into some of his ‘purely mathematical’ work. The suggested reading at the end can be referred to for more details.