Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about physics, science, academia, and pop culture. In one of David Lodge's comic novels about academia, the ...

At the heart of every resonator — be it a cello, a gravitational wave detector, or the antenna in your cell phone — there is a beautiful bit of mathematics that has been heretofore unacknowledged.

You might have already passed that silly course with a title something like "Introductory Algebra and Trigonometry." It covered a bunch of stuff, but the important part was that the class was a ...