For Western professor Jan Minac, "there is no greater joy than understanding something that looked mysterious before."
And Minac's been experiencing - and spreading - joy throughout his career, as a globally renowned expert of Galois theory, an area of mathematics that studies the relationships between groups of numbers and generalized numbers and how they can be transformed or rearranged.
Ján Minac (Keri Ferguson/Western News)
His research, advancing how certain groups of numbers (called fields) relate to each other through their symmetries (called groups), allows researchers to deeply understand solutions of algebraic equations and differential equations. This theory also allows scholars to study large data efficiently.
There are many applications of this theory in mathematics, physics and chemistry, with promise of further application in a number of new areas, including neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Here, Galois theory may reveal patterns that might not otherwise be evident.
