The Real Truth about Real Numbers

By Sarah Cooney ’17

Math is one of my passions.  I’d love to tell you about the cool research I’m doing.  Sure, you may not understand everything I’m saying, but I probably didn’t completely understand the description of your work either.  I’d love to tell you why I love math, in the same way you’ve told me why you chose your major, but with your critical comment—“Oh, I hate math!”, you’ve seemingly closed these avenues of conversation. As math major Shelley Donaldson ’18, who has known she wanted to study math since the age of eight, said, “It’s awkward, because it’s difficult to come up with a response.”

I wouldn’t dream of telling you I despise your major, which is probably one of your passions, just as math is one of mine. But, I’m sure most of you aren’t intending to be malicious.  As professor of mathematics Paul Klingsberg, Ph.D., reports about digging deeper when people express a distaste for math, saying, “I sometimes find that the speaker reports becoming discouraged or losing confidence as a result of one or two formative experiences. Typically, that’s as far as the conversation gets, but I suspect that in many cases, the discouraging experience stems from one or both of two things: An instructor or mentor who was unduly discouraging or insufficiently encouraging or not expecting math to be as difficult as it is.”

I think many of us math enthusiasts unconsciously understand this reasoning—after all, we have subjects we hate, too.

Sometimes we even hate math; probably more than you do. We all struggle with different things, and as humans we have a tendency to dismiss those things we can’t master easily as not being worth our time.

Knowing this, we should be able to ignore the negative reactions to sharing our majors with others—but as actuarial science major Julie Osborne, ’18,  said, “It is hard to hear others constantly say how much they hate math when math is something some of us love.”

Luigi Nuñez, ’17, remarked on the topic as well. “Maybe you love cats, but I love the abstractness of math and how you can find it in everything. I’m not asking you to love it, but just try to tolerate it please,” Nuñez said.

David Hecker, Ph.D., professor of mathematics, said, “Math is really that important in trying to understand this increasingly complex world.”  Hecker went on to say, “When students ask me, ‘Will I ever use this?’  my answer is ‘Certainly not if you don’t know it.’  Ignorance in any area is never helpful. Not knowing math means you are missing an important problem-solving tool. If you have no math knowledge, it won’t even occur to you to take a mathematical approach to solving what could otherwise be a very easy problem.”

Much of the work in advanced math is not memorizing equations or theorems.  Instead, it is about learning new ways of thinking and conditioning your mind to apply them quickly and unconsciously. Here is a perhaps trivial, but nonetheless true example.  I’ve moved more times than I care to count in the past two years, and with each new adventure comes the daunting task of packing.  Packing is really a question of the most effective way to put two, or three, or four months of your life in a suitcase that never seems big enough.  As I’m packing I’ve often pondered the benefits of rolling versus folding clothing.  Immediately, my mind leaps to how I could calculate the volumes to settle the question once and for all.

I’ll conclude, as usual, with my biweekly reminder, or perhaps plea, to show math and math enthusiasts a little love. Sure, I’d adore it if this column could turn you all into math-lovers! However,  if I’m being realistic, what I really hope my readers (I do have readers right?) get out of it is even just a modicum of respect for the power and beauty of math, and perhaps more importantly an understanding that there are a few of us out there that really do love math.

  So folks, next time try to find a less hostile platitude to offer when you hear, “I’m a math major.”  And if you really can’t think of anything, take a lesson from Thumper, the little rabbit in the Disney classic “Bambi,” “If you can’t say something nice… Don’t say nothing at all.”