
To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics - digital55
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20170202-math-and-the-best-life-francis-su-interview/
======
110011
As a counterpoint to the overly exuberant article let me chime in as a
graduating theoretical computer scientist. Math is hard and despite its beauty
and allure academic life doesn't take place in a vacuum- ergo there's a lot of
politics and pettiness from your peers. You should expect to invest years of
your life into making progress on some hard problem with little encouragement
in the meantime, this takes a tremendous toll on the mind and not for someone
who falls easy prey to self doubt. Sometimes even after you publish your top
result that took a lot out of you, it may take many years before people
appreciate, let alone understand, your work- the vast majority of papers are
never going to be read. To compensate for this horrible feedback mechanism you
need to basically play the popularity game and try to give many talks and talk
up your result when you meet people, so there's a lot of salesmanship involved
here as well. So the career path of a junior scientist is pretty crushing
mentally and I couldn't stomach it in the long run.

In an ideal world I might have continued in academia but the career path is so
twisted you have to either be insanely good (at math and at managing time) or
just hate yourself enough to sacrifice your best years working essentially in
the metaphorical darkness well outside the spotlight and most likely alone and
poorly paid.

~~~
Balgair
Chiming in from Bio: Yep, this is true here too.

I can't find the citations right now, but there was a recent study done
through Elsiver's website. The group got a hold of the servers for Elsiver and
took a look at page views. They wanted to know what the rates of papers being
read was. It was... disheartening. They found that ~46% (again, not sure here
as I can't find the source) of papers will _never_ be looked at outside of the
authors, reviewers, and the editors. The articles are not only never
downloaded, but the pages are never even loaded. The stats were, to me,
confusing, but hey that is what peer review is for. Still, if you take this
paper (that I can't find now) to be true, ~half of all papers are effectively
lecturing into the void. I admit, I drank a bit after reading that one.

~~~
justinpombrio
In CS, most authors host "preprint" copies of their papers on their own
website, and most views are of those versions. So I wouldn't be surprised if
Elsiver's defunct distribution system isn't getting used much (at least in
this field).

~~~
Balgair
Yes, but roughly half of all papers will never even be page-loaded from the
'official' source (if you believe my recollection). I am not a CS researcher,
but I would imagine that of 10 people that cite a paper, at least one will
bother to download the original paper or look up the source. Hell, even
'vanity' page-views of your own work would have been counted in the paper that
I mentioned, and that is with many authors on a single paper too.

I honestly don't know what to make of it really. I at least bother to look at
my papers once, if only to show my family on the Holidays, and I have a lot of
so-authors that may be doing the same. Are most researchers so fed-up with
their own work as to not even bother looking at it again? What is going
through their minds concerning their efforts? It's just ... heartbreaking. At
least half of researchers don't seem to care at all, not even the people that
put all that time and effort to get their research out there. Like, what are
we doing with our lives?

~~~
JamesBarney
To be fair most papers are written for readers that have the exact same
viewpoint and specialty. So they are incredibly difficult to parse for people
in the same field but a different sub specialty.

I think many more papers would be read if authors invested more time in
learning how to write.

------
EternalData
I took this to be a general call to learn and practice mathematics, and not as
a summons to a career in academia, so perhaps I'm seeing it a bit differently.

I have to say as somebody who through attrition always feared math in
university that it is meaningful to think about reasons why people fear
embracing certain types of knowledge. It's only after the fact that I realize
how useful and even how romantic applications of mathematics might be.

I might never be a starry-eyed or an often-drunk academic, but I've grown to
really see my initial lack of mathematical learning to be an immensely high
opportunity cost. So I can relate to anybody who thinks of structural reasons
people might shy away from math and indeed all forms of intimidating
knowledge.

~~~
posterboy
>how romantic applications of mathematics might be.

like, in the dating market or do you mean a philosophical potential? The
philosophical aspect is huge, eg. _to tell_ once meant counting, or logic and
language having a common Greek root.

~~~
EternalData
I mean, I was thinking more of romance as "imbued with idealism", but if
differential equations can help me find true love, even better.

------
gthtjtkt
Based on all the supposed benefits of doing math, it sounds like people would
be better off studying philosophy. Same benefits but a much broader appeal,
and far more applicable to most people's everyday lives.

When I finally "discovered" philosophy in college, I was angry that we hadn't
been exposed to it at all in middle or high school. Instead, I'd been forced
to waste years on things like math, biology, etc. that I had no interest in
and no use for. Our history / social studies classes would be greatly improved
if they incorporated more philosophy.

~~~
jcoffland
I disagree. I find math much more interesting. Philosophy is vague. It's all
guesses and interpretation, with the exception perhaps of pure logic. I like
the purity of math. It's all a matter of preference.

~~~
ThomPete
The concepts you deal with in philosophy are vague, the challenge is to
provide very precise analysis of these vague (fuzzy?) concepts.

But yeah I don't think one is better than the other. Each provide value.

I would actually claim that to live your best life, be an engineer. They seem
to me at least to be living in that sweet-spot between the abstract, creative
and the concrete.

~~~
apocalypstyx
Along with a increased chance of being a creationist and/or jihadist.

[http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Salem_Hypothesis](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Salem_Hypothesis)

[http://scienceblogs.com/tfk/2007/11/11/the-salem-
hypothesis-...](http://scienceblogs.com/tfk/2007/11/11/the-salem-hypothesis-
explained/)

[http://www.theness.com/index.php/creationists-mechanical-
eng...](http://www.theness.com/index.php/creationists-mechanical-engineers-
and-the-second-law-of-thermodynamics/)

~~~
danbruc
This has a 99% probability of being absolute nonsense. Looks more like 30
years of anecdotal evidence and hearsay. Try find a credible source with
actual numbers.

~~~
apocalypstyx
I'd love to know where that 99% comes from. (Or maybe I wouldn't.)

I'd say there's far more than anecdotal evidence, but not, obviously, not
enough to draw necessarily firm conclusions. So I would say there's enough
question to sustain further scientific inquiry. That, interestingly enough,
puts us in a position at odds with one of a common traits noted among
engineers, in psychological terms: 'need for closure'; which would put the
'engineering mindset' in conflict with the 'scientific mindset', due to the
open-ended nature of the science. (Of course, this is only my own
speculation.) Which is why we get things like this:
[http://cosmicfingerprints.com/ee/](http://cosmicfingerprints.com/ee/)

Harder numbers:

[http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/users/gambetta/Engineers%20of%20Jih...](http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/users/gambetta/Engineers%20of%20Jihad.pdf)

(expanded book form)
[http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10656.html](http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10656.html)

(less numbers, but foundational)

[http://www.sicotests.com/psyarticle.asp?id=212](http://www.sicotests.com/psyarticle.asp?id=212)

[http://www.sicotests.com/psyarticle.asp?id=235](http://www.sicotests.com/psyarticle.asp?id=235)

~~~
danbruc
I pulled the 99% out of thin air, I just wanted to emphasize how small I
estimate the chances of this being true. I found one analysis [1] that found
that creationist or only half as likely to be engineers as the general
population, admittedly only using data from a preexisting survey as proxy for
the question at hand.

Maybe it is a naive view on my side but I expect that additional education
will make it less likely that one believes religious claims to be true in
general and this extends to becoming an engineer and being a creationist.

But even if there was indeed a correlation of the form claimed by the Salem
hypothesis, I would naturally want to look for traits that make it more likely
for one to become an engineer and a creationist, not for something that causes
engineers to become creationists.

You did not explicitly spell it out this way and I am inclined to think you do
not think this causation exists, but your response to a comment suggesting
that it might be a good choice to become an engineer at least allows the
interpretation that becoming an engineer causes becoming a creationist.

And I obviously consider the idea of a causal relationship between being an
engineer and being a creationist even more unlikely than that of certain
traits increasing the likelihood of becoming an engineer as well as a
creationist.

Not that it is unlikely in the general case that learning about X makes one
more likely to also believe Y, that is actually certainly pretty common, but
in the concrete case I am really unable to see which things one learns when
becoming an engineer are suitable to turn one into a creationist.

Finally I am not sure what you wanted the express with the Evolution 2.0
article, but at least in the linked article the reasoning is heavily flawed.

[1]
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/talk.origins/Xunl5Sl...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/talk.origins/Xunl5SlJmZc)

------
sametmax
The problem with this theory, is that it completely ignores that a lot of
people good at math have poor people skills. And you need people to be happy
and improve your life opportunities.

So yeah, math is beautiful, and if you like it, go for it.

But if you look for a skill to acquire or practice, your taste no
withstanding, this may not be the best investment. Sport, social skills,
languages, time management, self introspection and cooking are examples of
things that usually pay off better than math in your life. It brings more
people, opportunities, health, money, etc.

Again, not saying math is not a good thing to practice. We need math as a
specie. And an individual may need it for his or her happiness. But as a
strategy I don't think so.

~~~
RandomInteger4
Maybe people good at math are actually great at people skills and you're just
repeating a bias spread by a banality driven media.

~~~
ianai
In my experience, people are all equally bad at math. There are just people
who have spent longer with the problem(s)/domain(s) and have developed a skill
set around it. They start from the same beginnings, though. If you take them
out of their usual 'watering hole' they go straight back to beginner status
(and of course the degree of it varies by how far it is from their usual
routine).

~~~
sametmax
Yes, but some personality traits will make you more apt and willing to keep
working on it.

There is a limit in the skills you can acquire. If you spend time and energy
on flirting, learning to dress up, building social network, you will have less
time to learn maths.

Because of course you'll have sport, music, games, books, movies, family and
other study topics taking time as well.

Now maths incline kids, given the choice, will usually choose working on math
than going to 10 groups of people to chit chat about superficial topics just
to stay in the network.

Nothing wrong about it, just an observation.

------
Koshkin
Well, mathematics is hard. It takes a lot of effort to really learn it, a lot
of dedication and (self-)motivation. Not everyone can do it, and, frankly,
very few people - even among those who have spent many years studying
mathematics - could say that it is the best way to live your life.

~~~
macawfish
I profoundly disagree. I believe that mathematics can be learned and
appreciated by many, because mathematics is a language for articulating inner
urges and perceptions that are common to a wide range of creatures, not only
humans. This idea that mathematics is only for the few is self fulfilling, and
perpetuated by narrow ideas of what it constitutes.

~~~
kutkloon7
I agree. I think that mathematics is being teached the wrong way. Especially
in the USA, the state of math education is absolutely terrible.

I suspect a more visual approach to be more useful than the classical textbook
approach. It is true that a lot of textbooks do use pictures, but video's
would help a lot, I think.

~~~
FabHK
There is a wonderful book, "Visual Group Theory", that demonstrates this
approach [1].

However, there are people who learn better algebraically than visually. So,
combining different approaches would probably be optimal -- the problem
currently is that often a very dry (and anti-historical) endless litany of
definition, theorem, proof is taught.

[1]
[http://web.bentley.edu/empl/c/ncarter/vgt/](http://web.bentley.edu/empl/c/ncarter/vgt/)

------
primodemus
Francis is a great lecturer:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqEyWLGvvdw&list=PL04BA7A9EB...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqEyWLGvvdw&list=PL04BA7A9EB907EDAF)

~~~
mcshicks
I agree, I watched his lectures when trying to teach myself real analysis. He
also has a website with lots of useful info including links to the videos
organized by lecture number/subject and some other interesting links

[http://analysisyawp.blogspot.com/](http://analysisyawp.blogspot.com/)

------
westoncb
It seems like a lot of the benefits mentioned could arise from many other
activities with similar likelihood. I think a lot of it has to do with
developing expertise at something _you believe_ is important, and which you
are (or can become) comfortable doing.

Totally agree that for people working in abstract technical areas (e.g.
software architecture, philosophy, inventing things), however, mathematics has
a special sort of value over other subjects. It deals in these super distilled
concepts which have very general applicability; so, the concepts you learn end
up expanding this pool you can draw from for coming up with new, related
ideas, in a wide range of fields.

It's also important to learn it as a sort of literacy, to widen the range of
technical material you can read.

------
stablemap
Everyone I know who went to his MAA farewell address said it was wonderful.
Definitely follow their link to read or hear the whole thing:

[https://mathyawp.wordpress.com/2017/01/08/mathematics-for-
hu...](https://mathyawp.wordpress.com/2017/01/08/mathematics-for-human-
flourishing/)

~~~
danielahn
There's a link at the top of your linked site to an audio recording - maybe it
was recently edited in

~~~
stablemap
The Wayback machine does not absolve me—probably I just missed it twice. Thank
you.

------
nojvek
I wonder if inmates have access to computers, would they become good
programmers?

~~~
Hydraulix989
Give anyone (not just inmates) a computer and they are much more likely to
become good Candy Crush players, Facebook users, and Buzzfeed readers than
good programmers.

~~~
GuiA
Sure, just like give anyone access to a library and they are much more likely
to read magazines and romance novels than 19th century French literature.

That's missing the point though. The point is access and opportunity. Even if
only 5% become programmers, it's a net win overall (and that's not even
counting the people who might play Candy Crush but still use the computer to
better themselves in other ways - learning, filing taxes, etc.).

~~~
xor1
There's nothing wrong with his response given how the original post was
worded...

------
SZJX
Well maths always sounds good with all its allure of "purity" and "intellect".
However I think one should remember that maths is basically some very-high
level abstractions on our analog, chaotic world. Just like rigid
linguistics/grammatical rules fail miserably in representing actual human
languages, abstract maths probably also cannot claim to represent the real
essence of the world that well. Even a statistical/neural network-style
approach does it so much better. So yeah, if you're so into constructing and
deconstructing abstruse abstractions, maybe do maths very seriously. But does
it really represent the "truth" of life? I think that might be a bit dubious.

------
jwtadvice
While I can not claim to have made any imporant progress on the sorts of toy
problems I like to work on (e.g. counting/bounding the number of strings two
regular expressions both accept, counting the number of ways to represent
integers using polynomials), I find the mere process of working on them,
inventing new notation to succinctly express ideas and read relevant (and
completely irrelevant) mathematical textbooks and articles a way to keep an
"active brain" but relax: probably because nobody expects me to produce
anything and my career doesn't depend on it.

------
king_panic
Elementary math skills, which many of us reading and writing on Hacker News
know, would change the lives of many millions of people in ways we take for
granted.

~~~
acqq
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the
exponential function"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1C9DyIi_8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1C9DyIi_8)

------
recycleme
Interesting. Anyone have a recommendation on a Math app for everyday use?

~~~
sn9
The level of math amenable to apps isn't really what Su is talking about.

I would suggest learning proofs, and maybe pick up some _Art of Problem
Solving_ books. Or perhaps working through the foundational curriculum of any
decent math program (e.g., algebra, analysis, topology, number theory, etc.).

~~~
dllthomas
[http://incredible.pm](http://incredible.pm) is perhaps relevant, albeit
shallow and localized.

------
stOneskull
it reminds me of the awesome team who get involved with the numberphile
youtube series. guys like james grimes and matt parker. inspiring the love.

------
KennyCason
I was recently explaining to a group the radiance of learning math for many
years. It is really hard to convey the beauty that you see in things after
years of studying math/logic. That amazing feeling through your mind when you
solve something new. I can sometimes only best describe it as a lens that
allows you to sense a previously imperceivable part of the universe and self.
I can't even imagine walking around without this lens. Perhaps that sounds a
bit hyperbolic or mystical, but this is my feeling.

------
sillypuddy
Frank Su is a great teacher. I had him in ~2000 Teaching Game theory at
Cornell, and I still remember the Math Fun Facts he used to start the class.

------
dgotrik
Here's the video:
[https://www.facebook.com/maanews/videos/10154879169165419/](https://www.facebook.com/maanews/videos/10154879169165419/)

------
losteverything
Surprised no mention of music.

<play, beauty, truth, justice and love.

Math and music gives me all those.

My Math inclination brings tears To binary situations and lasts (as in the
last time I'll ....)

Truth is a set.

Justice is relativity (<,>,=)

Play is math humor with the pun as king.

And love is random uncontrolable feeling.

------
norcimo5
"To Live Your Best Life, Do +Applied+ Mathematics". There's something
delightful about using mathematics as a mean to an end...

------
RA_Fisher
Being math with different syntaxes, this is true for programming as well.

~~~
sn9
That's certainly the contention of the authors of _How to Design Programs_.

[http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/part_preface.htm...](http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/part_preface.html)

------
katehall
I would rather say "to live your best life, make art"

------
n0mad01
and also take your vitamin d.

------
wnevets
> In 2015 he became the first person of color to lead the MAA.

I didn't realize chinese was a person of color.

~~~
eru
Compare
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7819625](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7819625)

------
cosinetau
The Greeks also drank hemlock. Just saying.

------
andrewflnr
Su seems almost blind to the fact that you can do math outside an academic
environment. You don't need to go to school for math to experience truth,
beauty, play, etc in the context of math. You can read books, play around with
the results, read articles on places like Quanta. You probably won't discover
new things this way, but it will enrich your life.

If your goal is for math to make people's lives better, then assuming school
is involved at all is another unnecessary restriction.

~~~
drakenot
_Su opened his talk with the story of Christopher, an inmate serving a long
sentence for armed robbery who had begun to teach himself math from textbooks
he had ordered. After seven years in prison, during which he studied algebra,
trigonometry, geometry and calculus, he wrote to Su asking for advice on how
to continue his work. After Su told this story, he asked the packed ballroom
at the Marriott Marquis, his voice breaking: “When you think of who does
mathematics, do you think of Christopher?”_

It doesn't sound like he has that bias to me. He opens his talk speaking about
someone who is a non-traditional student doing match outside an academic
environment.

