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Good morning Hank; it’s Wednesday, May 18th, 2011, also known as Button Your Button Day.
Hank, in the last 24 hours I finished the big revision of my novel and I also watched
your poetic commencement address, and it made me think a lot about education and why we’re
alive and stuff.
Right, so when we think about education we often think about a soft/hard continuum. On
the far edge of hard, you have mathematics which, you know, there’s only one right
answer, and everything’s about numbers and data. And then on the far edge of the soft
side you have the study of literature, where everything’s about, you know, what it means
to be a person in a world full of other people and how to understand ourselves in history
and all that boring stuff.
You know what I’m talking about, Hank: history’s pretty soft, physics is pretty hard, biology
is somewhere in the middle because, you know, it involves adorable baby pigs but they’re
dead and you have to dissect them. Psychology thinks that it’s hard but it’s actually
soft; economics thinks that it’s soft but it’s actually hard, you know what I’m
talking about!
Right, except in my opinion, Hank, that continuum is complete and utter... Warner Chilcott.
So Hank, when you study mathematics, you’re really studying two things: first you’re
studying mathematical language. So the simplest kind of mathematical language is that when
we talk about the number seven we’re not only talking about seven donuts or seven pairs
of pants, we’re talking about the abstracted idea of seven. And then when you get to algebra,
the language of mathematics suddenly involves letters. And the language of math gets more
and more complex as you learn, which is why, when I read something by Brotherhood 2.0 Resident
Mathematician Daniel Biss, I feel illiterate.
So that’s the first thing you’re doing when you study math. The second thing is that
you’re attempting to understand the universe, right? I mean, I don’t want to overstate
the matter, but that’s basically what we’re doing. Ultimately, the reason that we have
to know that the square root of four is two is because it helps us to build cathedrals
and think about space and make out with people, but more on that in a second.
Right, so we study math for the twin reasons of wanting to learn mathematical language
and wanting to understand our place in the universe, which turns out to be precisely
why we also study literature: to learn about language and to understand our place in the
universe. Which by the way, Hank, gets to the thing that make me angriest in the entire
world, which is when people say that there is only one right answer in math, but that
every answer is equally correct in literature. That’s just bunk!
First off, there is often more than one correct answer in math, and secondly NOT EVERY ANSWER
IS EQUALLY CORRECT IN LITERATURE! I am a giant squid of anger!
For instance, Hank, if you think that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a pro-slavery
novel, you’re wrong! You’re as wrong as you are if you think that the square root
of four is strawberries!
Right, so students of the world, I want you to look at me for a second. Most of the questions
that you’re asking in your literature classes are not that interesting. Like the question
of whether the author intended that symbol or that metaphor- let me tell you, as an author
who intends symbols and metaphors- that question is not interesting.
It doesn’t matter if, when I was writing Paper Towns, I wanted the Great White Wall
of Cow to reference the Great White Wall of Whale in Moby ***. The Great White Wall of
Cow and/or Whale isn’t there for you to think about authorial intent, it’s there
for you to think about nature’s seemingly absolute apathy toward individual humans and
what the heroic response to that apathy is. And the reason that reading critically, like
reading for theme and metaphor and symbol is important is because those things are ways
in to the big, interesting questions, many of which are same questions that math is trying
to answer.
Hank, the vast majority of us imagine ourselves as like literature people or else as like
math people. But the truth is that the massive parallel processor known as the human brain
is neither a literature organ or a math organ. It is both and more.
Hank, putting aside learning for learning’s sake, I’d argue that understanding the universe
and its inhabitants is helpful in pretty much every human endeavor, which is why nerds,
in my experience, are more likely to understand special relativity and also more likely to
be good at kissing.
So math people, let me tell you that imaginary stories can be every bit as intellectually
engaging as imaginary numbers. And literature people, I am here to tell you that set theory
is every bit as fascinating and moving and beautiful as the Great Gatsby.
Hank, I’ll see you on Monday. Is it Friday? No, it’s Wednesday, isn’t it. Hank, I’ll
see you on Friday. God, I’m so bad at days! But really Hank, are days of the week math
or literature? They’re both.