Wind swayed gently and a bee waddled among the bushes, fleetingly perched on the sweetness of rose and finally nestled on the smiling daisy. Another one came along and made a sinusoidal crescendo of humming sound and settled on neighboring inflorescence. It is daisy’s day I thought. For some reason it appeared that entire swarm of bees on the hive were ignoring calls of all the other flowers in garden and crowding towards her. Feeling slighted, proud rose seemed to have become crestfallen and was looking sideways. Meanwhile jasmine as usual looked indifferent and lily upholding her wont appeared jealous. With ranging emotions in garden the colors ignited into vivacious semblance akin to those portrayed in English summer of Jane Austen’s novel.
Just a couple of months back a article was published in British science journal that said researchers at Queen Mary and Royal Holloway university discovered that the tiny bee brain can actually traverse the Travelling Sales Man problem. This NP-hard problem which is often considered as the benchmark for studying optimization and has captured imagination of generation of computer scientist all over the world all of sudden became a child’s play for these tiny hymenopterans. All the anguish of Mathematician like Hamilton and Kirkman when they discovered the problem and entire chagrin of any junior at computer science course for having to read theory of computation and delve into seemingly much ado for nothing realm of computational complexity, abruptly appeared puerile in front of mother nature’s play.
Nature is indeed a mathematician, painter, scientist and artist. Otherwise how would she know that the symmetry of dancing flowers should follow Fibonacci ratio, or radioactive element should decay with years corresponding to natural logarithm. Who knows some day, some where we might read that researchers discovered that school of fish actually triumphed in solving the convoluted partial differential equation of Navier-Stokes Existence and Smoothness whose partial solutions manifests as a grim reaper to any engineering students studying fluid dynamics. Perhaps this will lead to discovery of better aviation engines that will reduce the turbulence and make your flight as smooth as silk as advertised by Thai air in days to come. And you no longer will have to be judgmental towards the veneer in airhostess face that is trying to hide the inherent fear of flying while portraying a phony smile. And probably the Clay Mathematics Institute will bestow Mother Nature with prestigious Millennium prize with cool cash of 1 million dollar, which she will certainly spurn just like Mr. Grigori Perelman did after solving Poincar`e Conjecture.
All of sudden, the atmosphere changed and flowers appeared to gossip again. The topic of conversation might be that bees were going back to their hives leaving miss daisy lonesome again. Though chrysanthemum seemed to console her, queen rose appeared to be leading the rhetoric while jasmine was again indifferent. Though all the girls in the yard were cursing the impropriety of bees, no one can hide their true colors mingled with tinge of schadenfreude. Actually what usurped the joy of princess daisy was the portending rain. And before they could shelter the rain poured abysmally, which instigated helter-skelter among all the creatures that were hitherto enjoying the sun. Mother Nature was at it again, wielding her magic wand to bring forth another episode of chaos which ironically is called butterfly effect in mathematics. Only this time its precursors were those unseemly bees. And before the order was settled a wayward squirrel jumped over with a trajectory characterized by Lyapunov exponent that even fastest computer won’t be able to compute, and adding injury to insult landed on forlorn miss daisy. Unable to shield against that brute force she eventually succumbed to the rut. As if teaching the lesson of ephemeral joy and ubiquity of transience cloud went a drift, sun came out and nature smiled again.
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