Rome kicked off three days of mathematical fun and games Thursday with a star-studded Maths Festival cast including John Nash, subject of the Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind.
Other top draws include Benoit Mandelbrot, father of fractal geometry, Pulitzer-prize winning science writer Douglas Hofstadter ('Godel, Escher, Bach', 1980) and Sir Andrew Wiles, solver of the most fiendish maths riddle of the last 400 years, Fermat's Last Theorem.
Two Fields Prize (the maths Nobel) winners, Sir Michael Atiyah and Alain Connes, will also attend.
Atiyah, a former president of Britain's Royal Society, will speak about Beauty and Truth in Mathematics while Connes will revisit some of the philosophical terrain he covered in his popular books Thought and Matter and Triangle of Thoughts.
A winner of the Templeton Prize for seeking spiritual realities, physicist John Barrow, will give a speech linking mathematical and theological issues.
Former world chess champion Boris Spassky will talk to Nobel prize winner for physics Zhores Alferov about the relationship between maths and chess, while Nobel prizewinning playwright Dario Fo will entertain what is expected to be mainly a young crowd with a show illustrating the fun side of perspective.
Nicola Piovani, Oscar-winning composer of the music to Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful, will present a piece of musical research on the number seven.
"We have to get away from the stuffy side of the subject," said the festival director, eminent Italian mathematician Piergiorgio Odifreddi.
He said the festival would include a host of games to keep visitors' minds amused as well as engaged.
"Young kids find this subject tough because mathematical intelligence doesn't really develop until they're older, at about 13-14 years of age".
"That's why the Festival will feature a range of games to highlight the more playful aspect of maths."
Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni said the fest at the city's showcase Auditorium would "proudly" join an array of high-profile annual events on philosophy, science, literature, photography and cinema.
Nash, who won his Nobel in 1994 for his theory of "non-competitive equlibria" - memorably illustrated in the Russell Crowe film by a win-win bar pick-up situation if the contenders forget about the blonde they wanted in the first place - will talk to Odifreddi on Saturday, the final day of the fest.
Entry is free but on a first-come, first-served basis, Veltroni said.
The festival is entitled The Beauty of Numbers and the Numbers of Beauty.
