Keith Devlin

One of my favorite things about being in Europe is the different sense of productivity and laziness. In America—especially at Princeton—I am totally and completely productive. And by that, I don't mean that I'm working every second, but rather that I get a lot done. My breaks, when I take them, are either to eat or to go to an academic talk or to have an academic conversation with someone. When I eat in Princeton, it's either with another PhD student friend, or at a language table where I'm practicing another language and having cultural discussions over dining hall food. When I eat alone, I'll generally cap off the meal at 23 minutes. Why 23 minutes? Because that's the exact length of one episode of How I Met Your Mother, which is basically the only TV show I watch. I like the show for a variety of reasons, but especially for its length, which I find the perfect break from work. 23 minutes, now you can't feel very guilty about that, can you?

Well, in Europe, there is no Netflix (except in the UK), no Hulu, and even many YouTube videos are not available. Without my productivity saving 23 minute episodes of HIMYM, what am I supposed to watch? Well, I've moved on to podcasts and online courses. Yes, I know that it's just more school, but so far, I've been enjoying what I'm watching. The one I'm watching now is available on both YouTube and iTunes U, totally free, and a very good survey on mathematics. Now, much of it overlaps with Alex Bellos' first book, but this professor, Keith Devlin, attacks the material in a different way for a different audience. Part of spending all this time looking at what other people say about math is to see how they are saying it, how they sell it, how well their strategies work. We live in a world where people are afraid of math, hate math, whether or not they use it unwittingly every day. And I'll have to sell that sort of positive attitude towards mathematics eventually. In any case, if you're interested, you can find Keith Devlin's lectures here:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpGHT1n4-mAvzAtg6Qo8aTld6goSPxo4o

In the first lecture, which I'm watching now, Devlin begins with a history of the number. What I find very interesting after this and reading Alex Bellos' book is that numbers coincide so much with money. Mathematical abstraction is a direct result of banks! Sometime in ancient Mesopotamia, banks would seal tokens into clay pots in order to keep a record of how much a person owned. But in order to verify, they would have to break the pot open to collect the tokens. Eventually, they came up with a written language (a mathematical language—mathematical writing precedes the literary in this sense) and would write on the pots how many tokens were inside to avoid breaking them open every time one wanted to demonstrate his wealth. Finally, the most important step was realizing that they no longer needed the tokens—that the writing was enough. And the first credit cards were born!

This abstraction of numbers was extremely important because, as we all know, with the written language, we can determine properties of these numbers that weren't immediately obvious. We're all born with a number sense, but numbers and manipulating those numbers change that. They turn what is just an intuitive understanding into something exact, which is perhaps one of the few ways humans are really distinct from other animals (that also have a basic mathematical sense about them).

Once one has the mathematical language, one can manipulate it in any way, as long as the manipulation adheres to certain formal rules (of logic). In this sense, the rules governing mathematics—and even the mathematics itself—seems to precede the invention of the language. Discovering new math is like discovering something that was already there waiting to be found, something that explains in its own way how the world works. In this sense, Devlin explains the two ways of using mathematics: first, as a spectacle lens through which to filter the world and make sense of it in a useful way; second, to take your ideas from your mind and bring them into the world.

To contrast with language, written language follows the oral language, which has rules which are more like conventions. For anyone whose grammar has ever been corrected, don't worry! Grammar is a constantly evolving set of rules—as is orthography—that attempt to govern a language that is alive and already working. The invention of the rules of language follows the creation of the language itself. In this way, written language and mathematical language seem very different, but I do think there are several similarities. For one, it is true that we filter the world through the language we speak. Try thinking without words. It's pretty difficult. And the language we speak isn't just a tool to employ how we choose—it is heavily determined and shaped by the culture in which we use it. So in that sense, mathematical language helps us perceive the world and understand it, but so does our actual language. Reversing that, we can see that language does help us bring ideas from our mind into the world, helps us create and communicate.

So my question now is this: how does bringing mathematical language and theorization into literature (as the OuLiPo does) change the way we understand the written word?