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[Music]
[David Mumford] I have always felt what I really wanted to do was to explore the world.
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Mathematicians can invent any kind of world they want.
And the thrilling part of mathematics is the sense that you're an explorer
that can enter a purely mathematical world of abstract concepts,
but concepts which are linked by marvelous patterns
which sometimes just blow you away by their beauty.
[Music]
[Stuart Geman] David Mumford is unique in many ways but I guess most strikingly in the depth and breadth
of the fields across science that he has contributed to, not just mathematics.
But he is singular in the creativity and a scope that is very unusual among scientists.
He did so much for the sciences at Brown that you couldn't help but realize
how much he had done for the sciences in general.
The scope of science is the scope of David's interest.
[Music]
[Mumford] As soon as I got to Brown, I found this tremendous sense of collaboration.
I rapidly made friends in a dozen departments, not merely in pure math and applied math,
in engineering, in computer science, in cognitive science, in neuroscience, all over the map
and I really had a wonderful time working with people from all these different departments.
[Clyde Briant] Exploring and research is really built into the psyche of this institution.
Faculty from a wide range of disciplines, often bringing in the humanities and social sciences
with the life and physical sciences, coming together to look at these complicated problems
and really seeing the joy in trying to solve problems at this level.
Someone like Mumford, they've become almost the catalyst for this kind of thing to happen,
they show the way, they lead the way for this kind of collaboration, in showing the fun
of taking what you were trained in and applying it to it to a wide range of problems.
[Announcer] The 2009 National Medal of Science to David B. Mumford, Brown University
For his contributions to the field of mathematics, which fundamentally changed algebraic geometry,
and for connecting mathematics to other disciplines
such as computer vision and neurobiology.
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[Mumford] Without prizes, science and mathematics have a tendency to live in a limbo
and I think a medal like this is extremely important in making people know that
science and mathematics are there and are playing crucial roles in our society,
but I am very conscience of the fact that science and mathematics are large scale enterprises,
in which you are always working in a community of people
and mathematics would die without getting ideas from science,
science would die without getting ideas from mathematics.
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