I love words.
I study them, collect them, and one time played in a Scrabble tournament with two-time world champ Adam Logan — a mathematician!
I think most of us feel safe with words. We aren’t scared to face a piece of writing and give it an honest go, even if the writing is difficult, even if it is crap.
I’ve taught math for 20 years and math is different. Maybe it’s the calculations, or all the strange symbols. Whatever it is, it does not make us feel safe.
I’ve tried to understand why, to an obsessive degree, and I’ve come to a conclusion: Math makes us feel dumb.
“I like words more than numbers, and I always did.”
Embrace the dumb.
What if we wrote math questions that made everyone feel dumb — from Fields Medalists to fourth graders to parents who can’t add two fractions without their hair catching on fire?
Math at its highest levels is not a lot of numbers. It’s a lot of words.
So I started writing words-only questions for everyone. Questions like “Should parabolas carry umbrellas?” or “Are parallel lines lonely?”
With math questions like these, we are all equally confused — and equally able to participate.
“Mathematics is writing. For all the quantification it makes possible...it is ultimately words upon words. ”
Finger-steepling and sharks
In Nick Hornby’s Ten Years in the Tub: A Decade Soaking in Great Books, he pulls an excerpt from Tom Shone’s book Blockbuster. Shone is telling us what made Jaws revolutionary:
To get anything resembling such fillets of improvised characterization, you normally had to watch something far more boring — some chamber piece about marital disintegration by John Cassavetes, say — and yet here were such things, propping up in a movie starring a scary rubber shark. It was nothing short of revolutionary: you could have finger steepling and scary rubber sharks in the same movie. This seemed like important information. Why had no one told us this before?
“If this column has anything like an aesthetic,” Hornby writes, “it’s there: you can get finger-steepling and sharks in the same book.”
I happened to read that sentence this morning and it’s perfect. We are doing the same thing here. It’s finger-steepling and sharks in the same place.
“Thus are we constantly led to “invent” the language best suited to ever more finely express the intimate structure of mathematical things”
What this is not
One of my favorite books of all time is Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science. In the spirit of that hilarious and important work I have to say: math words have rigorous definitions. We are playing with words to be funny and invite people to the subject.
When Jacques Lacan conflates imaginary and irrational numbers or Julia Kristeva proposes a formal theory of poetic language based on set theory while misunderstanding Gödel and set notation, well, we hope you see these are serious academic misuses and not at all in the spirit of asking if cows have square roots or if parabolas need umbrellas.
I love math too.