An Ivy League professor explains chaos theory, the

prisoner's dilemma, and why math isn't really boring

businessinsider.com /steven-strogatz-interview-on-math-education-2016-6
Elena Holodny

Chaos. en.wikipedia.org

Math is a cool way for us to understand the world we live in. And to that end Business Insider recently spoke with
Steven Strogatz , the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University.

Strogatz specializes in areas of nonlinear dynamics and complex systems, and he is the author of the wonderful "Joy
of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity."

He talked to us about game theory, "elegant" math, math education, and the effectiveness of models in different
fields.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Elena Holodny: What's interesting in chaos theory right now?

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Steven Strogatz: Im often very interested in whatever my students get interested in. I primarily think of myself as a
teacher and a guide. I try to help them especially my Ph.D. students become the mathematicians theyre trying
to become. The answer often depends on what they want to do.

In broad terms, the question of how order emerges out of chaos. Even though we talk about it as chaos theory, Im
really more interested in the orderly side of nature than the chaotic side. And I love the idea that things can organize
themselves. Whether those things are our system of morality or our universe or our bodies as we grow from a single
cell to the people we eventually become. All this kind of unfolding of structure and organization all around us and
inside of us, to me, is inspiring and baffling. I live for that kind of thing, to try to understand where these patterns
come from.

Holodny: How do things organize themselves in nature even when there's no "central command" like
when birds fly in formation or people organize themselves in a power structure?

Strogatz: Were learning a lot about this all the time bird flocks, fish schools, herds of animals. You can have
human organization both within companies or even frivolous examples like people in a soccer match who want to
start doing the wave or clapping in unison. So we do sometimes spontaneously organize.

There are also cases when its really serious, like when buildings are on fire and people need to escape. You can
study the motion of people as they escape the building. And they actually will go out like water flowing through a pipe
Theres a kind of fluid dynamics of people as well as of cars. When traffic engineers are trying to figure out how
people are driving ... sometimes youll be stuck in traffic and theres a jam, and youre thinking, Oh there must be an
accident somewhere down the road, but then you never see an accident and you wonder why was there this traffic
jam? There was no reason for this.

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Wikimedia

So thats another case of bizarre collective behavior of people that we get in these density waves on the highway.
Density of traffic in some places and density somewhere else. And in that case it has to do with driver behavior. That
people dont want to get too close to the car in front of them. There are sort of mathematical rules that govern how
fast youre comfortable driving, depending on how far ahead of you the next car is, and also how dense the traffic is
generally. And so you can write all of these things in math and then start to predict what will happen with thousands
of people on a big long stretch of highway.

Or in the case of birds. They are flying around in three dimensions, and theyre very aware of how close their
neighbors are, how fast the neighbors are going, which directions the neighbors are pointing. They dont have eyes
on the backs of their heads, so theyre not so aware of whos behind them.

But, like I said, there are simple rules about what a bird will do in response to a neighboring birds based on how fast
theyre going, how close they are, and which directions theyre pointing. And then if you make computer simulations
of what youd expect, each bird is following these simple rules. You get behavior that looks exactly like what real
flocks look like, including if theyre flying around obstacles such as buildings or trees. You dont need a leader.

An equilateral triangle. Wikimedia

Holodny: To what degree are these computer simulations accurate? We dont even know how to solve turbulence
yet!

Strogatz: [Laughs] Well, thats true. But turbulence is much harder than bird flocks, I would say. Because we can
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make measurements on individual birds. You can have them follow robotic birds; you can train them. You can kind of
directly measure some of their response properties to other birds of their same species.

I dont want to give the impression that we totally understand flocks. Youre right to be skeptical. Theres a lot that
were just learning about this, but the field seems to be moving pretty fast.

Holodny: What do you mean by "the organization of morality"?

Strogatz: Yes, that's a strange phrase. The reason I said that is maybe youre familiar with game theory and the
prisoner's dilemma?

Im thinking here of this incredible computer study that was organized by a political scientist called Robert Axelrod.
In the 1980s, he asked the worlds leading game theorists from psychology and economics and computer science
all kinds of different disciplines to submit computer programs to play prisoners dilemma against each other ...
It was a repeated prisoners dilemma. Everybody played everyone many times And the question was, What
would do well in the kind of environment where everyone is using all of these different strategies?

Andy Kiersz/Business Insider

What this showed was that the winning strategy was the strategy that people called tit for tat. It begins by
cooperating on the first move and then does whatever the opponent did. So if the opponent cheated, or "defected" as
they say, then they will defect in retaliation. And so its a very simple strategy it was actually the shortest program
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that was submitted to the tournament. Only four lines of FORTRAN, the computer language of the era in 1980. So it
was the shortest program, and was very simple-minded, but it ended up winning.

Keep in mind here: These programs are not trying to be goody two-shoes. Theyre trying to win. These are self-
interested individuals. These are egoists, these are free market people, theyre capitalists, theyre try to do anything
to win. So theres no sense of morality here. This is just What does it take to win?

Now, to come to the punch line, when Axelrod analyzed what programs tended to do well in this prisoners dilemma
tournament, the ones that did well had four properties: Be nice, be provocable, be forgiving, and be clear. [Editor's
note: "Nice" means to cooperate; "provocable" means to immediately defect in retaliation when the other player
defects on you; "forgiving" means not to hold a grudge, e.g., someone resumes cooperating with you, and then you
resume cooperating and don't continue to punish them.]

So what emerged from the prisoners dilemma tournament was be nice, provocable, forgiving, and clear, which to
me sounds a lot like the ancient morality that you find in many cultures around the world. This is the eye for an eye
morality, stern justice. This is not the New Testament, by the way. This is the Old Testament. And Im not saying its
necessarily right; Im just saying its interesting that it emerged it self-organized into this state of being that the
Old Testament morality ended up winning in this environment.

Charles Darwin's first diagram of an evolutionary tree, 1837. He wrote "I think" at the top. Wikimedia

Theres a footnote to this story thats really interesting, which is that after Axelrod did this work in the early 1980s, a
lot of people thought, Well, you know, thats it. The best thing to do is to play tit for tat. But it turns out its not so
simple. Of course nothing is ever so simple. His tournament made a certain unrealistic assumption, which was that
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everybody had perfect information about what everybody did, that nobody ever misunderstands each other. And
thats a problem, because in real life somebody might cooperate, but because of a misunderstanding you might think
that they defected. You might feel insulted by their behavior, even though they were trying to be nice. That happens
all the time.

Or, similarly, someone might try to be nice, and they accidentally slip up, and they do something offensive. That
happens, too. So you can have errors watch what happens, if you have two tit for tat players playing each other,
and everybody is following the Old Testament, but then someone misunderstands someone else, well, then watch
what happens. Someone says, Hey, you just insulted me. Now I have to retaliate. And then, Well, now that youve
retaliated I have to retaliate because I play by the same code. And now were stuck in this vendetta where were
alternating punishing each other for a very long time which might remind you of some of the conflicts around the
world where one side says, Well, were just getting you back for what you did. And this can go on for a long time.

But you could say morality came from evolution it's natural selection, which is all we're talking
about here trying to win at the game of life. If natural selection leads to morality, I think that's pretty
interesting. And that came from math!

So in fact what was found in later studies, when they examined prisoners dilemma in environments where errors
occurred with a certain frequency, is that the population tended to evolve to more generous, more like New
Testament strategies that will turn the other cheek. And would take a certain amount of unprovoked bad behavior
by the opponent ... just in order to avoid getting into these sort of vendettas. So you find the evolution of more
gradually more and more generous strategies, which I think is interesting that the Old Testament sort of naturally led
to the New Testament in the computer tournament with no one teaching it to do so.

And finally, this is the ultimately disturbing part, is once the world evolves to place where everybody is playing very
Jesus-like strategies, that opens the door for the [the player who always defects] to come back. Everyone is so
nice and they take advantage of that.

I mean, the one thing thats really good about tit for tat is that the player who always defects he cant make
much progress against tit for tat. But it can against the very soft, always cooperating strategies. You end up getting
into these extremely long cycles going from all defection to tit for tat to always cooperate and back to all defection.
Which sort of sounds a lot like some stories you might have heard in history. Countries or civilizations getting softer
and softer and then they get taken over by the barbarians.

So anyway, I mean, its all just stories. But what I meant when I said morality is self-organizing because its an
interesting question for history: where does morality come from? And you might say morality came from God OK,
thats one kind of answer. But you could say morality came from evolution; it's natural selection, which is all were
talking about here, trying to win at the game of life. If natural selection leads to morality, thats pretty interesting. And
that came from math!

Holodny: So in a painting, for example, a line is something in it of itself but also expresses something else,
an approximation of what we see in reality. It seems like math has that as well, with six as a concept, but
then you have a measurement of six inches. But measurements are imprecise, so in that way its not
accurate but rather an approximate reflection of reality. Is there a direction that the math world is moving in
here?

Strogatz: Well, this is one of the oldest questions there is. I wouldnt say that this is a recent development or
moving in any direction. This goes very far back.

Holodny: This is like Plato versus Aristotle.

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Strogatz: Exactly. This is Plato, man! You know, where do these concepts live? Because for him, theres the triangle
you can draw in the sand, and then theres the triangle that exists in the world of pure ideas the Platonic realm,
whatever that means. It sounds like nonsense, because there is no such place. Where is that place? Yet, its very
helpful to imagine that there is such a thing as a perfect equilateral triangle or a perfect circle.

It sort of seems like our math cant possibly be compatible with reality. Except that it is! And not just
compatible, but remarkably powerful.

Take a real number, say, the number pi, which kids always find kind of baffling because they like to start reciting the
digits ... It looks kind of random. 3.14592 So theres no simple sequence here except that these are the digits of
pi. But if I tell you that there are infinitely many digits of pi it never ends, it never repeats, it goes on with no
pattern that we can discern and thats what a typical number looks like. Thats a very bizarre abstraction because
in the real world, nothing is infinite as far as we know. And whats so amazing is that we have all kinds of reasoning
about such things going back to Euclid, and Plato, and Pythagoras. We get conclusions, as well as more high-
powered things about calculus with the concept of real numbers.

Quantum theory would tell us that theres only a finite number of particles in the universe. The universe is not
thought to be of infinite size. Were not sure but, you know. So, infinity, I think you can make a pretty good case that
there is no infinity in the real world. And yet, even to describe basic numbers like pi, you need to the concept of
infinity. And so it sort of seems like our math cant possibly be compatible with reality. Except that it is! And not just
compatible, but remarkably powerful.

It's this spooky thing where you reason about perfect objects, like real numbers or perfect circles or
equilateral triangles we know that they dont really exist, and yet by pretending that they do exist to
a good approximation in the real world, you get predictions that work.

Its given us the phone that were talking on right now. The electricity and magnetism that let people predict that you
can do wireless communication, and then turns out you can make gadgets that do it. That came out of studying a
subject called vector calculus that Maxwell did in the late 1800s. That prediction of wireless, or rather, the real
prediction was that electricity and magnetism together could make a wave that would move at the speed of light
thats an electromagnetic wave is what radio waves are that was the prediction. No one knew that that was the
case; it came out of math. And then it was measured, and it was exactly right.

So its this spooky thing where you reason about perfect objects, like real numbers or perfect circles or equilateral
triangles we know that they dont really exist, and yet by pretending that they do exist to a good approximation in
the real world, you get predictions that work.

At least in physics. Its not as good in biology, and its even less good in psychology and economics, as you know
well. [Laughs]

Some things are very well described by math and others are still in the future to be better described by math or
maybe in principle they cant be we dont know in some cases. I mean like, it could be that the irrationality of
people is just beyond mathematical description and thats why we have so much trouble in subjects where human
beings are the dominant force. But well see. We dont know. Were working hard.

Holodny: Its fascinating how much of a difference there is between physics math and economics math.
Econometric models, already at the start, seem to me to be inaccurate because they were biased toward a
person's opinion.
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A linear regression. Wikimedia

Strogatz: Yeah, thats a good point. I mean, whats the right scientific model for economics? Is it physics? Like
some of the early practitioners of economics seem to talk about equilibrium and youd see in the old days of
Keynesian economics ... people making models with pressure. They even built hydraulic computers to try to
compute the flows in the economy. They took it very literally as flows of money, except they pretended it was water.

So there was that, but nowadays a lot of people think that biology is the better model for economics.

Holodny: Angus Deaton, who won the 2015 Nobel Prize in economics, is more of a data collector by style,
and thats more similar to biologists who look at the nitty-gritty details of a given population to predict what
might happen next. As opposed to just building models, and then wondering why things in the real world
don't look like your model.

Strogatz: But also you hear a lot about businesses replacing others through processes of creative destruction. And
that theres an ecosystem of companies and interacting with the government. Also with weather and all kinds of stuff.
And theres a whole complicated, really, ecosystem, and that seems to be the picture with a lot of Darwinian
competition and cooperation.

So maybe its true that biology gives us a better analogy than physics. But there are some things even with
biology that are governed by physics, too. You cant really escape the laws of nature, meaning, the laws of
physics and chemistry. I dont think its an either/or. Those physics and chemistry principles go very deep, reflecting
even in the functioning of people, cities, and economies.

Holodny: Let's go in a different direction. Many people say math is boring.

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Strogatz: I get the point about why people find math boring or meaningless. I have two daughters ones in high
school and the other just finished middle school and their teachers are trying to do their best. And they have a lot
that theyre supposed to teach according to the curriculum, the standards and all. Theres a rush to teach students
what theyre supposed to know. And kids dont all go at the same pace, so some are left behind, others are bored.
And also, often what theyre teaching is often not what any kid would ask.

Getty Images/Christopher Furlong

If I could say just one, simple thing, that would be it: much of school is about and I dont just mean math, but
school in general is about teaching kids the answers to questions theyre not asking. And thats kind of inherently
boring. That is, if youre stuck at a party and someone is going on telling you something you dont have any interest
in, and you would never ask about that, but theyre just dumping the answers on you that is the definition of
boredom. [Laughs]

So I feel bad about that because the teachers are stuck: Theyre supposed to do what theyre doing, but for many
people its automatically boring, whether its history, or English, or math. But math is especially tough because
theres a lot of jargon, a lot of unfamiliar ideas. Its difficult it truly is ... People do have to concentrate, and a lot of
people dont like to have to concentrate that hard for that long. There are certain things that are difficult about the
subject.

But on the other hand, it is true that a lot of little kids like puzzles. That is, many people do like using their minds to

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solve logic puzzles or crossword puzzles or brain teasers. And you dont even have to be very smart to like that. I
think a lot of people like that.

Im kind of arguing against myself. Even though math can be difficult, so what? A lot of things can be difficult. Its
difficult to shoot a basket from 20 feet away, but people like to practice and try to do it. Cant math be like that too?
And the answer is, of course it can. And in the hands of a good teacher, it is like that.

It's difficult to shoot a basket from 20 feet away, but people like to practice and try to do it. Can't math
be like that too? And the answer is, of course it can. And in the hands of a good teacher, it is like that.

That teacher could be a parent or an actual teacher. I think weve all had good teachers who inspired us to want to
learn more math and helped us, and then weve also had some not-so-good teachers who started to turn us off.
Thats not really different from anything else because in any profession; there are good dentists and bad dentists.

But anyway, I guess as far as what to do about this, you have to hope that bright or creative people go into teaching
and are rewarded for doing it But it does make me feel bad, and of course all mathematicians feel bad, that so
many people hate our subject. But it is a common experience, especially in America, to run into people who say, Oh
God I hated math. Or, rather, what you frequently hear is I was pretty good in math until we got to and then
youll hear decimals, or algebra, or geometry.

Holodny: What does it mean to you when a proof is elegant or beautiful?

Strogatz: I think elegant proofs or arguments or calculations all have a few features in common, which are that they
tend to be concise its hard for something thats very long-winded to be elegant so theyre snappy and short
usually. And they tend to be surprising; theres some kind of aha moment, you know, like you suddenly understand
something but you didnt see it coming, so theres this combination of being surprising and yet inevitable that once
you see the argument, that you see the proof, you feel like, Oh that is really clear and obvious, I shouldve thought of
that!

Holodny: Do you think that describing math as beautiful could alienate people who dont immediately get it?

Strogatz: I worry about this a lot. If you keep talking about how its beautiful, people who dont get the beauty may
feel alienated or outside the club. Its worse. They already feel disempowered, and now its like everyone else seems
to get it and is enjoying it, and I feel left out. And that is not good, and I am sensitive to that. Youre right, this
obsession with the beauty of math, which we hear about is risky, double-edged.

A big part of teaching successfully is to have empathy. That you need to be sensitive to the students
who aren't getting it, who dont see why it's beautiful.

A big part of teaching successfully is to have empathy. That you need to be sensitive to the students who arent
getting it, who dont see why it's beautiful. Its not beautiful to them if theyre not getting it. The only remedy is to
either help them get it, or to not keep harping on the beauty.

I have found that, when I ask my kids about when they like math and, by the way, they dont always like it; I dont
have two super-math-y children they can do it, and they like to tease me about how much they hate it, but they
dont really hate it. But when they seem happy with it, its usually not because its beautiful. I dont think it would even
occur to them to say its beautiful. What they like is that its satisfying. That is just feels good that it works. Its
satisfying that everything came out right. I dont know a better word for it than satisfaction: when the puzzle pieces fit,
what does it feel like when youre done with a crossword puzzle or a jigsaw puzzle? You wouldnt call it beautiful. Its
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satisfaction, right? Its like a relief that, ah, yes, that worked. Thats enough for many kids. You dont have to insist on
beauty which is a kind of a hoity-toity, pretentious thing in some circles.

The other aspect is that theres competition. Some kids I want to say especially boys, but I dont know if thats
correct but there are definitely some kids that like beating other kids. And math gives them a very black-and-
white way to beat them. You know, I got a better score on this math test than my friend and I like that. And I have to
admit that I felt that way. In seventh and eighth grade, I used to have a couple of friends who beat me in certain
things and I liked if I could beat them in math. [Laughs]

So, you know, we never talk about that when we talk about the popularization of math. Its a way you can beat
someone. But it does give you that if thats what youre looking for. There are competitive people out there.

Holodny: I totally relate to this.

Strogatz: Right, so I think beauty is one of the appealing aspects of math, but so is this theres a kind of lack of
subjective aspect to it. It can be very objective who solved the problem, who solved more problems, who did them
better, simply, who got the higher score. And thats nice. In the same way that downhill ski racing doesnt have the
same problems as figure skating has where somebody is just faster. Whereas in figure skating, it depends on who
the judges think showed more artistic merit. Some people dont like it when there are subjective things like art or
beauty, and they would prefer pure speed, or I jumped higher, or I ran faster. Math definitely offers opportunities for
that.

And actually, speaking of double-edged, that can be a turn-off for people, too. Because they see it as so black and
white, they think math is cold or math doesnt leave room for creativity. But of course thats false because pretty
much everything that human beings do leave room for creativity. And math is no different. An example would be
when someone is solving a math problem; theres usually lots of different right ways to do it. And some will be more
creative or more insightful than others. Its not true when people say that math is just right or wrong. You can have
many things that are right, but some are more elegant or more creative or more insightful or illuminating than others.

And thats what we do at the higher levels of math; were trying to be professional mathematicians. Were looking for
proofs or calculations that illuminate, that make us have aha moments or feelings that we now understand
something down to the bottom of it. Rather than some ugly calculation that shows the answer, but we still dont
understand why it works.

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Two linear equations. Wikimedia

Another example of the aesthetic side of math is sometimes well find that two seemingly different parts of our
subjects are connected. Like, we teach algebra and geometry separately, usually, but theres a thing called analytic
geometry or just to put it down to earth, when kids in high school learn y = mx+b as the equation for a line, theyre
connecting an algebra formula with the ys and xs to a geometric idea the straight line. And then when they solve
two equations simultaneously, that corresponds to the geometry of two lines crossing at a point. OK, that seems
pretty easy but human beings didnt know this until Ren Descartes and Pierre Fermat figured that out when they
invented analytic geometry in the early 1600s.

So its not like Pythagoras knew how to do this in 500 BC. I mean, it took 2,000 years for people to figure out this
connection between algebra and geometry. Thats kind of cool, too, isnt it? You can take a kid whos not so clever
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and teach them this technique in high school and they can learn to do it solve simultaneous equations by making
graphs of lines and looking where they cross that defeats the best minds in the world from a few centuries earlier!

Holodny: Which is stunning.

Strogatz: Its amazing. These methods are so powerful. You can take the smartest people in the world at one time
who couldnt understand and couldnt think of them, and then fast-forward 2000 years and now anybody can do it.

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A page from Fibonacci's "Liber Abaci," one of the first Western books to describe HinduArabic numbers. Wikimedia

You dont even need to get as fancy as analytic geometry. Even arithmetic. People in ancient Rome could not really
multiply because its very hard to multiply Roman numerals. If you can remember them, with the Xs and the Vs and
the Ls. If you would try multiplying Roman numerals, its quite tough. And so people in the street couldnt really do
arithmetic, and theyd be counting on their fingers and stuff. Now, everybody can do arithmetic, and its because in
India they invented the concept of zero, which of course had to be invented. It wasnt there the idea of nothing.
People knew about nothing, but they didnt know that it was a number. That was a big insight: that zero could be
regarded as a number and that it would obey the same rules as the other numbers. And then of course negative
numbers were invented, too.

So you have all these expansions of the universe of numbers that lead to greater and greater power and then
ultimately this decimal system or writing the decimal point and then doing everything with base 10, which we dont
even think about and just take for granted. But thats what they call Hindu-Arabic numbers. And the decimal system
with place value that came from India and then through the Islamic world and eventually to Europe. And that
was only in the 1200s. That this guy Fibonacci who we always hear about with the Fibonacci numbers he was
the one who brought the Hindu-Arabic numbers to Europe, in Italy, and helped start the Renaissance. That took a
few more hundred years, but still.

So, a lot of these things are kind of recent. We went a long time before arithmetic was common to the average
person.

Holodny: Whats your favorite course to teach?

Strogatz: Thats a tricky one for me to answer. I do like them all. I did enjoy very much a course I taught a year ago,
and will teach again next year, which is math for liberal-arts students. We call it Mathematical Explorations, and the
way that its pitched is that this requirement that everyone has to take some quantitative reasoning. What you should
be imagining here is the kid who really does not want to take math, and who thought, Oh, God, I thought I was done
with this in high school, and now my college is requiring me to take one more math course. These courses are
designed for them. These are kids who dont take calculus. I mean, anyone whos doing calculus and is a science
major, an economics major, they already passed out of this requirement. This is for everybody else.

What do you do in this course? Well, you could do something really boring make them learn algebra again, which
they didnt learn the first time. But what we did in the course was, first of all, no lectures. I didnt come up with this
idea. This was developed at a college called Westfield State Discovering the Art of Math is a course where they
try to show the connections between math and art. Like dance or sculpture, the visual arts, music, everything. And
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not just art, but also literature, history And I buy all this because sure, math is connected to all these things but
they really show it. For instance, if they want to teach the math in dance, they have the students and I was
following their approach I would have my students get up and do Well, a lot of kids are sensitive about
dancing. So am I. I was a pretty lousy dancer. [Laughs] Its intimidating when someone says, OK, now were going to
do dance. What we would do is game where we were standing in front of each other, and Id put up my left hand and
youre facing me, and you have to look like my mirror image, so youd put up your right hand. And then I start moving
other parts of my body, and youre supposed to be doing the same as me but in mirror image.

Rotation of a two-dimensional object around point O. Wikimedia

What are we learning? Were learning about the concept of symmetry the idea of a mirror reflection. And then I
can do other types of symmetry, like instead of you being my mirror image, you could be me, but rotated 180 degrees
And so we start playing these games with symmetry, like we can add a third person. And so if youre 180 degrees
rotate from me, but then the other person is a mirror image of you, then how is that different person related to me?
And so youre composing symmetries, youre doing a symmetry of a symmetry. And what that gets to is the
beginning of a subject called group theory, which is the study of symmetry that gets used in studying crystals or

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studying secret codes in cryptography or elementary particle physics. String theory is based on group theory. Its a
really deep subject that we can illustrate by teaching these simple things about kids moving around and dancing.

Its a really different picture of a class instead of everyone sitting and taking notes I honestly think that its the
first time for many of these students that theyve ever actually thought about mathematical things. Instead of
memorizing or regurgitating on a test, theyre actually thinking and solving problems and asking questions. It also
has a whole emotional, psychological side to it, where I ask them to say whats confusing about this or whats
upsetting about this or what did you like about it? You might say its stupid, this touchy-feely [stuff], but its
actually important for this population. Because a lot of them have so many hang-ups about math that its very
validating to hear someone else say that they found it confusing or they were embarrassed that they didnt
understand negative numbers. And that lets a lot of them kind of let go and actually open up and start to take a
risk and think about these things for the first time.

The other thing is that all mathematicians know that we make mistakes constantly. When we're doing our
professional work in research, we're constantly saying stupid things, making mistakes, correcting each other, being
embarrassed. Your face gets red. That's normal. I mean, that's why they call it trial and error. You have to take risks,
and try things, and make mistakes to make progress.

When we're doing our professional work in research, we're constantly saying stupid things, making
mistakes, correcting each other, being embarrassed. Your face gets red. That's normal. I mean, that's
why they call it trial and error. You have to take risks, and try things, and make mistakes to make
progress.

But so much of school is, "Dont make any mistakes, get it right." This class, I feel, is a necessary corrective to that
to show, that this is a safe place where you can make all the mistakes you want as long as you can learn from them.
And its fine and its actually good because mistakes are very instructive.

Theres a problem with this class, which is that we dont cover very much. And Im not teaching any preestablished
body of material that we have to get through. You can say, fine, you can get away with this because this is the last
[math] class these students are ever going to take and how much math did they really learn? OK, those are fair
questions. But the things that they did learn they learned really well. And more than that, they learned what it actually
means to do math, honestly, for the first time.

Because until then, they didnt know what math was. They were doing something else thats taught in school thats
not real math. Just like being a trained monkey, honestly. Its just like, can you do the tricks that youre supposed to
do. I know thats super-cynical to say, but ... for most people thats what a lot of their math experience is. Im
supposed to solve this quadratic equation. OK, Im going to see if I can factor it, and if I cant factor it, Im going to
use the quadratic formula. And I have no idea what Im doing or why I care. Thats what so many people go through.

Holodny: Thats why they hate math.

Strogatz: Thats why they hate it! No one wants to feel like a trained monkey.

Some of my colleagues are really skeptical. Theyre like, "Come on, what did they really learn in this course that they
couldnt do before?" Well, actually they can do quite a bit that they couldnt do before, such as come up with their
own arguments, but also explain them and understand why theyre true.

I feel like they made a lot of progress. A lot of it changed their attitude quite a bit, which is a great thing to see. That
they said, I get why people love math. I never understood that before. And it is fun. And it makes me want to learn
more which is the best of all.

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Holodny: Aside from math, youre a great writer. How do you see the relationship between math and
writing?

Strogatz: Math and writing well, they feel to me like pretty different enterprises in many ways, but a part of them
that feels quite similar is the need for organized thinking. That is, when people say that someone is a good writer,
often what they mean is that he or she is a good thinker. Part of good writing is that the organization is good, one
idea leads to the next, or a story flows naturally from what came before. The coherence of good writing is like the
coherence of a good mathematical argument. Youre not left wondering, why are we doing this now? That theres a
natural flow when things are set up right. And its hard to get them that way; thats what makes it difficult.

But then, as I hear myself saying all of that, about organized thinking in both writing and math, I also realize that
theyre both also similar in that you have to make a mess. You dont start out by doing organized thinking in either
writing or math. You first start out by making a big mess in both at least most people do because you dont
know where youre going with it.

To do something creative or very original, you will make a mess, you will break things, youll be confused, youll be
sloppy, youll try stuff that turns out to be a dead end. Whether its a sentence or a paragraph or a calculation. That
is common, I think, to all kinds of creative activities. That you have to be strong enough and brave enough to make a
mess and to get stuck and to not give up.

To do something creative or very original, you will make a mess, you will break things, you'll be
confused, you'll be sloppy, you'll try stuff that turns out to be a dead end ... You have to be strong
enough and brave enough to make a mess and to get stuck and to not give up.

Thats another thing that we dont teach enough in math or in writing, probably that the first draft is supposed to
be terrible. Just get a first draft. I have a lot of trouble with this, I would admit. My wife, whos an artist, said to me
that the way I write would be like if I were painting with the smallest brush. Like, Im painting it all the details, trying to
put the commas in the right place, and not thinking enough about the overall structure, the overall architecture of
whatever Im trying to do. And she said, and of course anyone knows this, that you have to paint first with the big
brush, get the overall shape, and dont fill in the details until towards the end. You dont know where youre going,
how can you possibly do it?

A similar thing with students trying to come up with a proof or derive an equation. They often are trying to do it step
by step, and it doesnt work like that. You have to see the overall picture, which draws on a different part of the brain
intuition, visualization, some daring. And, by the way, social activity. We often mischaracterize math as this
isolated and solitary endeavor, and its not. A lot of math involves two people or more batting ideas around and
arguing, trying to understand each other. Its social. That also can be messy, but thats how a lot of creative work is
done.

Math and writing do have a lot of overlap in that they require these two facets of creativity. The first is the willingness
to make a mess, and then the willingness to clean it up.

Read Steven Strogatz's book, "Joy of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity."

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