![]() ![]() Among mathematicians, as Wilkinson discovers, there is even a general derision toward those who seek useful application. The introductory steps to formal math, on the other hand, demand a commitment to rigor and abstraction while withholding any usefulness. But when you learn a language like Spanish, you can casually pick up some words and immediately unlock a new culture. Math often gets talked about as a language with logic as its grammar. He is now reproachful of his education and his younger self: Why hadn’t he learned all this better when he had the impressionability of a child?Ī year later, Wilkinson can solve some calculus problems, but the journey was difficult, the terrain harsh and often unwelcoming. You have to take on faith what I tell you.” Where his niece and others see patterns and order, he perceives only “incoherence, obfuscation, and chaos” he feels like a monk who sees lesser angels than everybody around him. When Wilkinson complains to his niece that math is not yielding to him, he is told, “For a moment, think of it as a monastic discipline. The mathematicians he talks to speak of their profession with quasi-religious sentiments and think of themselves as mere prospectors of a transcendental order. When Wilkinson is not hunched over textbooks, he is dazzled by the mysticism surrounding math. What’s more, he finds the textbook writing atrocious. The skepticism of an adult gets in the way he cannot seem to accept the rules-the way variables can be added and multiplied, how fractions and exponents work-as readily as children do. But even the first steps through algebra are backbreaking. His niece, a math professor, agrees to hold his hand through this journey. Wilkinson has a better plan than mine: he starts with standard textbooks. “I was returning, with a half century’s wisdom, to knock the smile off math’s face.” ![]() “It had abused me, and I felt aggrieved,” he writes. In his 2022 book A Divine Language, he describes his journey as a quest for redemption after those struggles with high school math. Recently, Alec Wilkinson, a writer for the New Yorker and a longtime believer in self-improvement, took on a yearlong project to conquer some of the basic mathematics that evaded him in his youth: algebra, geometry, and calculus. I am not the only person who has tried-and failed-to break into the church of math. What motivates it, and what is its ultimate endgame? What does the world look like to someone steeped in the culture of mathematics? So when I discovered that Terence Tao, a living legend of contemporary math, was offering an online class on his approach to “mathematical thinking,” I had to check it out. But despite having been close to math for most of my life, I continue to be bewildered by mathematics research. I often catch myself resorting to the vocabulary of research and analogies from physics to explain myself. Indeed, certain concepts-like the fact that opposite charges attract or that disorder or entropy tends to increase-are so universally ingrained in our experience that they creep into everyday language as metaphors. In physics, the questions we ask and the theories we come up with aim to explain the underlying reality better. And this feeling is only reinforced by popular books on math, which often take the tone of a pastor dispensing sermons to the faithful. As a graduate student in physics, I have seen the work that goes into conducting delicate experiments, but the daily grind of mathematical discovery is a ritual altogether foreign to me. Perhaps part of the mystique comes from the fact that biographies of mathematicians often paint them as otherworldly savants-people who seem to pull nature’s deepest truths from thin air and transcribe them in prose so succinct and self-assured it must be read meditatively, one word at a time. Mathematics has long been presented as a sanctuary from confusion and doubt, a place to go in search of answers. ![]()
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