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senior people and it was generally
accepted. When that happens, it’s
exciting.”
It’s not only her own success that
pleases Gurevich. “What delights
me is seeing good results – it doesn’t
have to be me who finds it. I just
love seeing new ways of looking at
a problem.”
Pure math includes a sense of
artistry, a sort of revelation in
uncovering a truth that has always
existed but hasn’t been known
before.
“Think of a very large picture,”
she says. “At the moment, you only
see small parts of it, but then you
suddenly see that pieces connect.
Now you see more of the whole
picture. What I do is like that.
Making it possible to see how things
connect, so we reveal a reality we
haven’t seen before.”
It’s in that sense that making a
mistake isn’t a disaster. “What
frustrates me is when something I'm
focusing on doesn’t work, when the
pieces of information I have don’t
fit together. There are no
contradictions in math, so that
means I’ve made a mistake
somewhere.
“But that’s not all bad. Mistakes
can be good. When the pieces don’t
fit, I go back and find the error. So
then, again, I’ve learned something
I didn’t know before and that’s very
pleasing: to find a new piece of
information.”
Whether any aspect of pure math
has any practical utility is beyond
what Gurevich does. “I don’t know
about practical aspects,” she says.
“I’m a theorist. Other people work
on practical applications. But of
course, they do occur – some pure
math concepts are useful in code
theory, cryptography.
“In my field, we seek out the
unknown. We try to establish the
relationships between things. We
strive to pin down knowledge no
one had before. In a sense, it’s a
search for truth.
“What we’re looking for is out
there. It exists. We just work to reveal
it.”
BGU NOW 47