On being really, truly, bad at Math

In recent months I have found myself doing something that I thought I would never, ever do after my freshman year of college. I’ve been thinking about math.

I’ve been thinking about math because an increasing, even alarming, number of people in my life are involved with it, to greater or lesser extent. Some of them simply make use of it, on their way to discovering bits and bobs of fact in their specific branch of the Sciences. Others like to apply it, to poke it into shapes and forms that will one day be the basis of the machine revolution, when the things we’ve made think faster, better, more beautiful thoughts than we can. One, notably, loves math for its very own sake, pure unadulterated mathematical theory, applications and science be damned.

How can I love people who love math? How can people who love math, love me?

In high school I made it through calculus, garnered my A by the skin of my teeth, study-sessions with a boyfriend’s father, and sheer bullheadedness. There was no way a daughter of my parents would fail to take an available advanced track in school, and there was no way that I could come home with the C that I rightly deserved. In fact, occasionally I even enjoyed math. I liked geometry; I adored fractions (maybe because nobody else did?) It was one of those awfully tough subjects that is balanced by striking epiphany. English does not offer the same moments of blinding clarity that math provides. English rarely lets the pieces fall so neatly into place. Every once in a while, I really got a mathematical function, and I felt even prouder of myself because such moments were so rare.

I fought math through elementary school, did extra math tutoring homework at my father’s insistence, resented and hated every single workbook, and most of all the way that just as I got really good at them and could zoom right through, the teacher changed it up to something painfully slow again. In college I took physics, hoping to get some real hard science under my belt, and I passed with a B- (unthinkably low) due to religious attendance at office hours and the unending kindness of my professor.

I gather that if you keep on loving math you will pass through numbers and out the other side, to concepts and functions with names like stars and birds – I wish that I could learn more about a Martingale, but I doubt I ever will. I muddle through my days with decent mental arithmetic, a good grasp of the basics of accounting, and the burning shame of remembering just how hard I had to work a year ago to tutor middle school students in remedial algebra. None of these, it seems have much to do with math.

I wish I understood math. I wish I understood mathematicians. I wish that I too could track the functions of the universe, could build a brain and vision into cold machinery. I wish that I could grasp the thought of tesseracts without picturing an old woman pinching two points of her skirt together so an ant can walk across.

Every day I get up and I look at myself in the mirror and I wonder what I’ve got that mathematically minded people haven’t. They can write poetry just as well as I can (I kid myself. They write it better – think of Lewis Carol. He loved math before he ever dreamed a Jabberwocky). They can grasp the complex ins-and-outs of politics, better than I, can run a meeting, take a lover, produce an essay beautiful on every level from the paragraph down to the sentence and the word.

And all that I can say for myself, math-poor, heart-rich, is that I am better at comfort than any mathematician that I know. What I lack in numbers-and-things-beyond-numbers, it is my hope I make up for the parts of humanity logic would deny.

No, I am not Mr. Spock, nor was meant to be.

I love you, brilliant humans. I love you numbered and numberless, and when I look at you I will remember the awe with which I first watched “Donald Duck in Mathmagic land” and realized that there was a glory in the subject I most loathed, and I would never get to it.

I love you, and I will sit patient with you when you wonder why she needs to process so much, how ethics can go beyond facts, and how anybody in the whole world could sit, happily and patiently, and listen for a fifth, six, seventieth time to a story they’ve heard before, about somebody’s mistakes-that-aren’t-really-mistakes, and be happy doing it, and feel no sense of disappointment in the strange neural connections and odd chemical balances that make us human.

You will understand the songs of the universe, the music and the magic and the rhythms that span from atom to star. And I hope you’ll share them with me.

In the meantime, somebody, somewhere, will probably want to talk to me about their feelings. And that, at least, I can do. Every day.

8 comments

  1. Well. In one sense I think your comparison is very apt. Math requires sitting patient with concepts that stretch far beyond your comprehension — blindly struggling through a world of interconnected relations that hint and tantalize, but never completely reveal themselves. Riemann-Zeta function & human desire — these things are both too big to wrap your head around. Sitting patient with the former may be my job, and you may have talents at sitting patient with the latter. It may be.

    This concerns the spiritually daunting nature of math: the way in which math requires will.

    Math also requires knowledge of something akin almost to another language: a proficiency wholly technical and highly precise.

    So if you are (temporarily, I trust) struck so dumb as to have but one thing to say for yourself, your friends will have to assist. What *I* will say of you, math-poor, pragma-rich, is that you are the possessor of a world of specialized knowledge I may well never experience. You are exposed to the meat and splendor of the work done by wide variety of people in the world whose inner process few will contemplate and fewer will grasp the structure of. You are explicitly aware of the connotations of each word of the recipe-writer, of the chef, whereas the bulk of us plow through knowledge of food like snow-blowers, leaving a simplified straight-line path that utterly neglects the technical details whence spring the great arts of food.

    I do not like Aristotle for a variety of reasons.

    But I agree with him that “we are what we do” — that the special and most magnificent nature of ourselves is not, after all, intrinsically born, but lies precisely in our interaction with the world. Greater than the talent of any human being above the rest in any domain is the brilliant BEING of the homo-sapiens, and indeed the startling DOINGS of creation itself, of which we are all approximately equal benefactors, and in which we are all approximately equal contributors.

    Thus you may rest assured, fair Heliotrope, that your worth is incomprehensible to you — but to the extent that it is comprehensible to anyone, it certainly works beyond your will and love and patience, and spreads delicately into skills both technical and astonishing.

    • Hoy – this is an excellent comment, to an excellent post by Helio Trope. I couldn’t agree more. I’d like to add a few of my own thoughts, mostly on the subject of learning how to do math. Maybe these will offer an example of the points you both have made, and maybe they’ll at least be an amusing story. Please bear with me.

      My first math memory was Sprite. It was in fourth grade and we had multiplication contests and the winner got a two liter bottle of Sprite. I’d been living in the States for all of a year, and soda was Concentrated Awesome, and when (after many failed attempts) I finally won the Coveted Bottle one day, I felt on top of the world. Clearly, things were going to go well for Math and me.

      But then there was a long, cold period. I did math, and it was cool, and every time I went to a new class – from Algebra to Geometry to Calculus – I thought, wow, now is going to be the time when I learn all the Secrets of Math. And then when I was in my senior year and calculus was done I thought, huh, that was pretty simple. I was assured by my teachers that college classes would not be much more challenging, and I thought, meh, Math isn’t such a big deal after all.

      Then I met Scott. There are many stories to be told about Scott, but the important one for purposes of this post is Math. Scott told me about his Math teachers, crazy people who taught him set theory in fifth grade and abstract algebra in eighth grade and analysis junior year of high school. Scott made me take the linear algebra / formal proof class my freshman year, and he showed me what math was all about. He took all my Math pride and carelessly tossed it down the stairs and he made me feel small and insignificant. My math professor that year didn’t help. Math was hard, it was impossible, and I would never learn it. I tried really hard, I thought until my head hurt and stayed up until 3am doing homework and it still made no sense.

      There were a few other math moments in college, like taking Set Theory and learning about the awesome Vee Sub Omega set, which was so big it took our prof a good minute to describe just how big it is, and I think those helped. But the next Math moment for me was in Santa Fe. I was in the desert, a lowly undergrad doing science for the first time. Not just any science. Complex systems science, heavily math-based. I was completely convinced I had made it into the program by mistake. I was terrified of failing. And then I met X (I’m going to not give his full name because this is a sensitive story and X might be a big scholar somewhere).

      X was a sophomore, and he told me why he loved math. He told me about going to high school and doing lots of drugs and drinking and being addicted and not really caring about anything in life. He told me about coming to college and trying to get over his addiction and finding out that math gave him a rush – not because math can universally replace drugs (I’d love to give that PSA), but because for some people, it can. He told me about not stopping to do drugs, but doing less drugs and more math. He told me about going to south america to do astronomy internships with crazy telescopes and smoking up with senior technicians next to million-dollar machinery. He told me about quantum finite state machines and entanglement and math and physics and science and finally I realized that math can be Fun. Not easy, not daunting, just Fun, in the way hanging out with good friends or cycling or writing or having sex are Fun. Math can be a crazy part of life, and yes you have to invest so much time into it, but it’s the same with anything else, and if you love it, then you should do it.

      X told me all this, and then I came back to school, and didn’t take more classes, and had no fun with math until I decided to go to grad school. There I met Lillian and Jon and Michael and Thorsten, my professors who did incredibly hard math as part of their science, and enjoyed it, and explained it very well. They broke math down into simple concepts. They made me want to go out and solve more math problems, not only because they were useful, but because they were fun, in that way that X explained to me but I never got at first. For the first time in my life, I began to grok math (the way I grok it has to do with something like legos and puzzles but that’s for another post), and I began to enjoy math, and I began to really see what people say when they mean an equation or a proof is “beautiful.”

      My math journey doesn’t end there – hopefully. But I wanted to share it. To show how patchwork, non-linear, confusing, start-and-stop it is, how long it takes (sixteen years from my first Math moment and counting!), and yet how it can be rewarding. And also, how math is tied to people and objects and our world. How learning it and enjoying it, for me at least, had a lot more to do with the people I talked to about math, than with the functions and the concepts and the analysis. I used to think that learning math was about being really smart, maybe a genius; now I think that learning it is about enjoying it, and seeing it in our world. And I like to share that, to tell people that math is not cold and abstract and accessible only to genius level intellects. Math is warm and everywhere and we can touch it and feel it and smell it. Math is part of life.

      • Aww. Me boys. Me math boys. Two of the four wonderbrains inspiring this post. I only actually know three of you, and the third I spoke to earlier.

        So, this post is due for an update. It turns out that it’s not about humanity vs logic or love vs science or any of that, but about the failings of the American public educational system and my uncertainties about the gender-gap and how to be a really good tough noncomformist woman in the world today.

        Wouldn’t you know it.

        Thank you for your kind and, as usual, lovely words, Hoy. I promise I am not forgetting how to love myself. I wouldn’t dare.

        Thank you for your beautiful and, as usual, really interesting story, Vlad.

        We should all get together and watch “Donald in Mathmagic Land” someday. You guys can explain the tough bits to me.

        xo,
        Emms

  2. you know what drives me more bananas than people who have come out on the other side of math? motherfuckers who can write metered poetry, that’s who.

  3. I love what you wrote because it refreshing. I’ve read, and heard, a lot of people say they love math, but so few of those people have any idea what math actually is. They proclaim it just “makes sense” or that there’s always a right answer. Anyone with the gall to say that has never struggled through limit points in infinite dimensional space or felt the frustration and disappointment of being unable to craft a proof. Math is hard. And you seem to understand that, despite your history with it. Instead of feigning knowledge, you laid bare your ignorance and let your mixed feelings and bewilderment touch on the austere beauty that so much of the world is unaware. Thank you.

    • Hi Tony,

      Thanks so much for saying so. Coming to grips with how cool math can be and the ways I feel I missed out on that has been kind of a struggle. Watching my friends get excited and wrapped up and obsessed with their problems has been really eye opening. I want to say that I have a good analogue for it somewhere in my life, but I honestly don’t know. Is it, really, like sitting with a poem waiting for the right words to come? Is it like trying to wrap one’s head around the beauty and sadness of day to day life? I don’t know. I really don’t know what it’s like. But I know I love people who love it.

      Thanks for reading.

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