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IVY KUPEC: How Not To Be Wrong. Wouldn't that be a great thing?
Today, one of the most enthusiastic, smart and creative
mathematicians who the National Science Foundation just happens
to fund, visited our agency. Hey, hi, Jordan,
I'm Ivy Kupec. It's nice to meet you.
JORDAN ELLENBERG: Hi. Good to meet you, too.
IVY KUPEC: Lucky me, I got to chat with him over coffee.
JORDAN ELLENBERG: Just a large coffee.
IVY KUPEC: And the extra cool thing about this is, yep, he's
written a book with the title “How Not To Be Wrong.” While I
never did get the complete answer, I know now that the
secret is in the power of mathematical thinking and math
is everywhere. Yes, Jordan Ellenberg, Professor of Math at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison, also, has a
degree in creative writing and is a big tweeter with a penchant
for blogging. This guy has been referred to as a math world
super star so I had to wonder, where do those super powers come
from? What's your first memory of doing something with math?
JORDAN ELLENBERG: We had an old fashioned stereo that had a kind
of wood panel, can you visualize kind of pressed word panel in
front of the stereo that this rectangular array of like air
holes in it for the sound to come out?
IVY KUPEC: Sure.
JORDAN ELLENBERG: This array of holes there were eight rows of
six holes each, right? But there were, also –
IVY KUPEC: Yes, just like my observation -
JORDAN ELLENBERG: - six columns of eight holes each, right. And
so it was just a rather an amazing moment when I think I
knew at that time I think I knew the times tables I had learned
them and I knew that it was a rule that one number times the
other was the same as the other number times the one. Like it's
not just that somebody told me that six times eight was the
same as eight times six it's that's like a little fact about
the world that you can just observe directly. Math is really
unique among the school topics in that every single other thing
you learn in school, in some sense, you're dependent on like
the teacher or you're on kind depend on some authority, right?
Math is not like that. Math, you can check for yourself and
assess for yourself what is correct and
what is not and you're not really dependent on
the teacher's authority.
IVY KUPEC: Yeah, so I'm curious, so what are some of the
issues that you're working on now with your own mathematical
science research stuff?
JORDAN ELLENBERG: Oh, so, I mean, I'm a number theorist,
that's really what I am. So it's the very classical part of
mathematics that deals with whole numbers and their
properties. You would think we'd be done with that by
now because we've doing it for about 3000 years but no,
we're not done.
IVY KUPEC: No, yeah, so what do you do when you're a numbers
theorist? What's your day like when you pull out that blank
piece of paper?
JORDAN ELLENBERG: I would say these days most of what I'm
doing is kind of at the interface between number theory
and other subjects like, especially geometry. We've
understood that there's like a fundamental geometric underlay
to number theory in a way that was not visible before. There is
a like a sort of subterranean linkage that we're still trying
to understand fully and a lot of the stuff that I do is there.
IVY KUPEC: Yeah, it seems like math, and you can correct me if
I'm wrong, but it can solve the most mundane things like
figuring out how to get to this interview on time.
JORDAN ELLENBERG: Right, did I? I don't remember.
IVY KUPEC: And how to – I think you did. Is there anything math
can't help you understand?
JORDAN ELLENBERG: Yeah, of course, I mean –
IVY KUPEC: Like what?
JORDAN ELLENBERG: Actually, one thing I found I wrote a lot of
in the book sort to my surprise was I wrote a lot about religion
and people's attempts to understand the origins of the
universe. I didn't set out to write about that, I feel like
that's really the kind of stuff like gets under people's collar
and so I don't – didn't necessarily like want to go
there, but when you read about the history of math and
mathematical approaches to things, this is obviously a
question that's like really on people's minds like throughout
human history. So because math is a part of human thinking
about human history and because like the big questions about the
origin of the universe and the deity are big questions
throughout human history, of course, they intersect, of
course, you can't avoid it. So at least where I come out in the
book is that I find that this is a question where I think the
mathematical approaches are rather wanting. And in the end
I think it's not – it has never really worked for people to
address those kinds of questions mathematically. So that's why I
think I think there's lots of, I think sometimes, in fact, what I
find frustrating is that we're in kind of a golden age of
quantification and thinking about real world questions
mathematically. And I think sometimes people can get in a
bit of snit about that and it's like, oh, are you saying that we
just reduce our entire life to like a spreadsheet and be
robots? Like, no, like, of course, I mean, you have to
approach these problems with like a lot of humility, right,
and recognize that putting mathematics in doesn't reduce
the problem it enlarges it. It's like another lens
that you add.
IVY KUPEC: So one of the things I did notice about your book is
that it's filled with tons and tons of stories.
JORDAN ELLENBERG: It has stories because teaching is
telling stories. Every single concept we have in math was
invented for a reason. It was invented because people were
confused about something, or were trying to get less confused
and I feel like the best way to really motivate
a mathematical notion is to try to go back in time
to when that notion didn't exist and be like oh this is
why life sucked when we didn't have this notion.
This is what people were so confused about when they
had to work hard to develop this.
IVY KUPEC: Unfortunately at this point, we realized we were
out of time because it turns out either there are a lot of other
people who want to know How Not to be Wrong or most likely they
just wanted to learn more about Jordan Ellenberg's work in
number theory in algebraic geometry.
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