By Aji Kang
Who is math to you? To me, math is a funny friend who reminds me that I have so much to learn, who shows me that I gain a lot from letting go of ideas I hold on to, and who patiently waits for me to mature enough to see past the biases I have against them. Math is someone who has brought me closer to so many inspiring friends, and helps me connect with people even when we are distanced by culture, ideology, or life experiences. I study math because it helps me see myself and others differently.
“Every being cries out silently to be read differently.” (Simone Weil, page 188 of Gravity and Grace)
This quote is also the epigraph to the first chapter of Francis Su’s Mathematics for Human Flourishing, a book about empathy and how math can foster personal growth, and it inspires me at the same time that it unsettles me. Why does every being cry out to be read differently? Does that mean that just about any alternate reading will satisfy them? Why cry out silently? Why not announce this desire from the rooftops? By “being,” does Weil refer to just humans, or also to animals, plants, objects, and even ideas as well? And how exactly does one read in the first place?
These confusions lead me to believe that I still understand very little about what empathy means. I believe that the changes that accompany empathy are more worthwhile than changes that accompany many other efforts, and that empathy is connected with finding meaning in my life path. But I still do not know exactly what changes in me or in my relationships when I try to be empathetic, or what makes it possible for me to be empathetic in the first place.
I believe that being part of a community that is brought together by math holds a lot of potential for helping me to understand empathy better and grow as a person. What I mean when I ask, “Who is math?” is that I want my relationship with math to influence my growth as a person and help me learn to read every being differently. If you agree that this is a worthwhile attitude to hold, I invite you to participate in this stream.
In this recurring stream, I will be trying to encourage people to share how their relationship with math–whatever that looks like, and however much or little it has to do with particular math ideas–has helped them grow, fostered friendships, and impacted their life path. I hope to use this stream to compile stories from many different voices, because I want to hear stories from many different people, and because I have suspicions that many people also want to. If you would like to share your story privately or submit them to this compilation, please fill out this survey. I will reach out to you if I plan to share your responses.
To begin, I will share my responses to two of the prompts that I hope to ask people.
Tell me about one time math made you laugh.
One time math made me laugh was when, out of the blue, a sentence popped into my head: Every human is a walking existence proof. I had been thinking about how other people might think about me, and I was reflecting on some conversations I had where it felt like I was being forced to take a pop quiz. I could feel that with every response I gave to their questions, I was being put into a category in their head, and I felt revolted by the impression I was giving them. But I remembered that there were many times that I had done the same thing to other people: I asked them questions to see if I felt like they were worth getting to know better or not. I imagined that others could recognize what I was doing in those moments.
I remembered that certain mathematical objects also famously suffered from judgments like this. One of the most celebrated examples is when ancient mathematicians allegedly tried to understand the ratio between the length of the diagonal of a square and the length of its side, which is called the square root of 2, in the same way that they might understand the ratio between the lengths of any two sides of a “3-4-5 triangle.” Try as they might have, the square root of 2 could not be understood that way, and mathematicians eventually realized that what they were trying to do was impossible. In this way, the square root of 2 serves as the central character of a proof that there exists a ratio which does not fit neatly into their preexisting notions. Many people refer to this now as “the irrationality of the square root of 2.”
I wanted to do the same to other people. I wanted to be an example that there exists a way to live that is different from anything they can imagine. And I wanted to realize that other people I was unconsciously judging were also examples of ways of life that I could not imagine at that moment. This is an example of an “existence proof,” and thinking about this makes me laugh because it suddenly feels like math is filled with steadfast people finding their own life paths.
Tell me about a time in your life when being denied a math opportunity was a blessing in disguise.
In my second year of college, I applied to transfer to different universities and to a handful of summer math research (REU) opportunities. I was rejected by all eleven of the applications I sent, but I am grateful for both these outcomes and the fact that I went through the process of applying. This is because it made me realize that I had more to learn from my original college, and it marked the beginning of a major perspective shift in my life.
As part of the application process, I had to put to words why I like math and what I want out of studying it. So in response to one of the prompts, I wrote, “a very prominent part of being a mathematician is to be curious about and interested in real people–the curiosity, creativity and willingness to be patient with understanding difficult logical systems is in many cases a consequence of this interest.” I was surprised by this sentence even though I was the one who wrote it. What did I mean? Why did I write that? It seemed to have slipped out of my fingers without me noticing. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it: did I really mean this? Is it really the people who make me interested in math? I tried to express what I felt again, tentatively a few weeks later, when I wrote in another application, “It feels to me that learning math is like getting to become friends with, and starting to get familiar with, the personality of a very interesting person.” This was a slightly different statement–math is my friend? what does that mean?–but I felt that I meant it just as much as I meant the first statement I wrote. I soon came to realize that these two ideas–that I care about math because I care about people, and that math is like a person I can be friends with–are really the most crucial reasons for why I do math in the first place.
This became the inspiration for a short student talk I gave, a multi-year personal project I worked on, and this Math Values stream.
“The world is a text with several meanings, and we pass from one meaning to another by a process of work. It must be work in which the body constantly bears a part, as, for example, when we learn the alphabet of a foreign language: this alphabet has to enter into our hand by dint of forming the letters. If this condition is not fulfilled, every change in our way of thinking is illusory.” (Simone Weil, page 185 of Gravity and Grace)
Reading anecdotes like the ones I shared in this post are no substitute for having your own personal experiences with people, math, or otherwise. You will need to engage in something meaningful to you with your body and mind to be fully moved. However, in the same spirit as the Living Proof blogs that ran up until two years ago (and even making use of the same metaphor), I hope that compiling anecdotes like these can provide whoever needs them with many little proofs that there exists a way to relate to every being that is different from what they have previously imagined.
Aji Kang is a writer who, in college, majored in theoretical mathematics and minored in English and philosophy. You can also find Aji as A Well-Rested Dog on YouTube.