Last night I had dinner with my witness, the former emergency room physician and math Ph.D. My plans to visit the Sun Yat-Sen Garden in the afternoon after our lunch at Horseshoe Bay had been thwarted by a downpour but it had stopped raining by dinner time. We went to the aptly-named Rain City Grill. Rain City Grill is the Restaurant Nora of Vancouver. There was no cod on the menu so I ordered halibut.
People who know me well will find it stunning that I signed up for a solo dinner with a math Ph.D. I am the one who avoided having to take remedial math at Barnard by a mere 1 point on the matriculation test. I am the one who calculated in my Astronomy class that the moon weighs 90 pound and travels 35 millimeters above the surface of the earth. I have to ask my excellent secretary to do percent calculations for me (I can't even do them on a calculator). I am the one for whom a tax return is an impressionist exercise that occurs shortly before an entertaining and entirely inscrutable, months-long correspondence with the IRS. ("Box 37a should have contained the number 12," they say. Fine -- then you do my tax return, smarty pants.)
Earlier that day I had actually asked my witness his thoughts about tax returns. He said that he, too, found them obtuse and that he always did his own returns because he found it challenging to try to figure out WHY the IRS wanted you to add 13.5 to box 19 only to ask you three pages later to remove it. He approaches his returns as a logic game -- "if they want you to subtract line 19 from line 34 then there MUST be a situation in which line 19 is bigger than line 34. What situation could that be?" Etc. He said it lead him into an interesting philosophical rumination on the imaginary financial lives of others.
I learned more about his approach to math at dinner. I started with the basics. "Why do you like math?" "I think it's wild!" he said. "When I was young, I realized that 2+3 = 5 but that 3+2 also equals 5. It didn't matter which way you added up the numbers, the answer was always 5. And that's true no matter how long your list of numbers is. Addition is bi-directional! That's wild!" "I suppose that's true," I said.
Then he said he thought it was very satisfying to add up some numbers and get an answer and then to add them up several more times and always get the same answer. I said that did sound satisfying but that I could only speculate because that had never happened to me. Every time I add up a set of numbers more than once I get an entirely different answer each time. Sometimes I get 31. Sometimes I get 29. Sometimes I get 12. You see the problem. How do you know which one is right?
Instead of looking at me like I was an idiot, he said, "Ah, well, it sounds like no-one has ever taught you the trick of casting out nines." "That is most definitely true." So he taught me this trick and it didn't seem to have anything to do with the number nine but it is a way of figuring out whether you got the right answer. "You're kidding me -- all this time there was a TRICK to make sure you were RIGHT and NO-ONE EVER TOLD ME THIS?" Education today…..And it works for multiplication as well as addition.
We played more math games and they were all indeed "wild" and my witness became very animated and excited and after each game he would sit back in his chair with wide eyes and an impish grin and say, "isn't that WILD!" There was one where you did something with even integers and something else with odd integers and you kept going for a while until your paper was all covered up with numbers and it turned out you would always arrive eventually at the number 1. He said no-one has ever ended up with anything other than 1. Euclid figured this out, back in the day. He said, "whether you can end up with something other than 1 is still an open question in math." I looked at him, stunned. "Is this what math Ph.Ds do all day? Doing this over and over again to see if they come up with something other than 1?" The answer is yes, basically. Since the time of Euclid. I suggested it might be time to call it a day on that particular open question.
Which lead us to the discussion of which came first, math or nature -- math describes nature -- but we humans came up with it -- so how ironic that we just happened to have come up with a number system that also works in nature -- creepy -- WILD! -- if that's the case, why do we have to teach math -- if the concept of the number 2 is "natural," then how come we do not emerge from the womb able to do arithmetic -- you can't teach biology after all -- no, of course, you can't teach someone to sweat…. Etc.
Somehow in there we discussed how there is no such thing as sea level. Or rather, there is such a thing as sea level but it's different everywhere. The ocean on the west side of the Panama canal is six feet higher than the ocean on the east side. And that's true all around the world. Has to do with winds. So I came up with "Kim's Rule," "Sea level is only constant if you happen to be at sea." He thought that was pretty good.
My expert was happy to chat away for quite some time about Wild Math. The restaurant started to empty. It made me think maybe not everyone was interested in this. I said, "Do you find there are a lot of people in Vancouver with whom you can have this kind of discussion about math?" "No."
Then I asked him what the point of math was. WHY sit around in a room trying to come with an answer other than 1.
He said, "Well, that's part of the problem. That's why I went back to Harvard to become an emergency room physician."
There was a lot more to our dinner conversation of course, but that will give you the gist.
posted by Anonymous @ 11:13 AM
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