As was written in The New York Times when his biography, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, was reviewed (1998), Paul “Erdős (pronounced “air-dish”) structured his life to maximize the amount of time he had for mathematics. He had no wife or children, no job, no hobbies, not even a home, to tie him down.”

This was during most of the Cold War between, at the forefront of each side, swaggering mightily like something straight out of a comic book, the USA and the USSR. Except … this wasn’t a comic book. You really could die. Younger people don’t really know what this is like, for the simple reason that the threat of imminent. sudden extinction hasn’t been present since the Cold War ended. The world faces disasters, of course, but a sudden one, greater than the large-city scale, is unlikely in the extreme — now.

Erdős had little regard for Uncle Sam (that’s the United States), nor Uncle Joe (the Soviet Union, with “Joe” being a caricature of Josef Stalin), but he did enjoy clever ridicule, so he heaped contempt, publicly, on both sides, during the Cold War. He wasn’t a big fan of the S.F., either (that’s Supreme Fascist — of the Universe. Guess who. Yep. That’s the guy. Why is God always a guy?)

Erdős just wanted to do math, and this native of Hungary simply dismissed all else. Mathematicians need other mathematicians to talk to, for they are already crazy, in very specific and sometimes unintentionally useful ways, and need other people also so afflicted to talk to, lest they torment the uninterested with mathbabble. That is only one way of looking at it, of course, as people have explained to me about my own mathbabble, which is insufficiently advanced to allow me to comprehend that of Erdős himself.

Life was viewed differently by Erdős, and I do not mean in any way that would seem “normal” to any mathematics professor you might have met (feel free to ask them). If you worked on proving theorems, solving problems, proving certain problems can’t be done — all of which are varied ways of describing the same activity — then you were, to Erdős, “alive.” If you stopped doing mathematics, you “died.” I don’t know what he thought of those who never did mathematics, because he avoided interacting with them. With no home, he could simply get on a plane when all the local mathematicians were exhausted, their brains tired, and he would then go to another continent — there were several available, and he did this for decades — and the local mathematicians would welcome him with open arms, for it was an honor to have Erdős as a guest in one’s home.

Sources, and further reading:

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth, biography by Paul Hoffman, 1998.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/hoffman-man.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdös

More Erdős vocabulary:
“Women” were “bosses,” with “men” translating as “slaves,” in Erdős’s unique language of his own invention. Children were “epsilons,” and if you laughed at that, I do hope you are happy with the fact that you, too, are a math nerd. (For the benefit of those who aren’t, “epsilon” is a symbol often used, in mathematics, for variables with very small values.) There’s a lot more — and links to use to help you find it, right up there.

Black & White & Golden

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Black & White & Golden

On Calculator Use and Abuse

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Calculators are important tools.

Well, so are guns.

Everyone acknowledges that, if guns are going to be used at all, certain safety precautions are essential. While it generally is not a matter of life and death, the same thing is true of calculators.

I have seen — multiple times — students multiply or divide some number by one, using a calculator, and then be genuinely surprised when they got the same number with which they started. I have also seen a bright student calculate the mass of an atom, and get an answer larger than the mass of the earth. When I informed him of this, his reaction was predictable: “But that’s what the calculator says!”

These are examples of calculator abuse. Aside from avoiding errors, such as the “planetary atom,” it’s also important not to abuse calculators because such an act is insulting to one’s own brain.

Some people treat calculators as if they are omniscient and infallible. They aren’t. They’re small, simple, narrowly-focused computers. The human brain is also a computer, but a far more advanced one. The calculators are our tools, not the other way around.

Here are some tips to prevent calculator abuse:

1. Know how to do arithmetic without a calculator. If you don’t know, learn.

2. Use calculator-free mathematics when appropriate. If you need to know what six times eight is, for example, it insults your own brain to consult a calculator. Don’t do it!

3. Calculator-free mathematics is not to be called “mental math,” for the simple reason that ALL math is mental. Also, if you ever meet anyone claiming to have invented that insipid phrase, kick that person immediately.

4. If you have contact with children, promote the use of calculator-free math to them. This is most important, of course, for parents and teachers. It is no service to a child to raise them to be dependent on a calculator.

5. Finally, when you do use a calculator, don’t be too trusting of the little thing. Check your answers, constantly, by using estimation. Say, for example, you’re multiplying 109 by 36. That’s “a bit over a hundred” times “a bit under forty.” Since forty hundreds is four thousand, the answer has to be in the ballpark of 4,000 — and if a calculator disagrees, the calculator is wrong, probably because a human pressed at least one incorrect button. You will press incorrect buttons on occasion — we all do — and it’s important to have a method in place to detect such errors. This estimation-method is both simple and effective.

All these principles boil down to this: be smarter than your calculator. They aren’t actually very intelligent, so this is neither difficult, nor unreasonable.

The Rolling Stones Morph Into Muse

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This starts with “Sympathy for the Devil,” but soon changes.

Among the programs I used for the visuals is Stella 4d, which you can try at http://www.software3d.com/stella.php.

“You’re turning into a politician.”

Posted on 22 March 2013 by RobertLovesPi

Someone close to me said this recently. My response was immediate: “There’s no need to be insulting!”

However, the observation has proved to be accurate. I did not know then than I would run for, and win, an officer position in my labor union, nor did I expect to spend a day at my state capitol, lobbying against a bill in committee. I did not anticipate becoming a near-constant activist. However, all these things have happened.

I could say I’ll never run for a governmental office, but my record on pronouncements doesn’t seem to be good. I do know this much, though: I didn’t go looking for this. Events simply happened to my co-workers and myself. We didn’t go looking for a fight.

Living through a protracted struggle isn’t easy in any line of work. Teaching is no exception. The simple fact is this, however: we aren’t giving up.

No matter what.

My Unusual View of Islam

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My Unusual View of Islam

As most readers of my blog know, I am an atheist. All atheists differ, of course, and one of the ways I differ from almost all of my fellow atheists is that I have a very different view of Islam and Muslims.

I haven’t always been this way. 25 years ago, as an undergraduate, I had unconsciously allowed myself to be heavily influenced by media coverage of the Middle East. I’m embarrassed to admit now that, then, I concluded, simply and uncritically, that this entire region is chock-full of crazy people. I openly speculated that there must be some mind-affecting drug in the water there, to cause such madness as I saw on the TV news.

As I now know, TV networks are very selective about what they show. Burning American flags make the news, to the exclusion of coverage of the millions of sane, kind people in the Muslim world, for they are not viewed as newsworthy.

I will always be grateful to my Muslim friends for helping me make this transformation. They key was getting to know them, one at a time — not as Muslims, per se, but simply as people. After getting to know them, and calling them friends, falling into the type of thinking which is dominated by stereotypes quickly became impossible, for the stereotypes did not match the behavior of any of my friends. I was given a choice between believing TV, or the evidence gathered with my own eyes and ears, and that’s always an easy choice.

It is a shame, but it is true: bigotries are only lost one at a time. I am delighted to be free of my former Islamophobia.

I now have dozens of Muslim friends, all over the world. If it bothers them that I am not a believer, they politely keep that to themselves. They’re always willing to answer my questions about Islamic practices and beliefs, but never use such questions as an opportunity to try to convert me.

The contrast with Christianity, in my experience, is vivid. Of course, I do not experience Islam as one might in, say, Iran. I also do not experience Christianity as everyone else in the world, for I live in the American South, the part of the USA with the highest rates of religiosity, and a form of Christianity in ascendance which is often intolerant of others, in the extreme. Here, I have had many (but not all, of course) Christians react to my atheism quite negatively. I have to remind myself, often, that Christianity here is unusual when viewed through a world-wide lens. For example, consider evolution. Around much of the Christian world, believers have, long ago, “grown up” on the subject of evolution. Pope John Paul II himself said that he viewed it as valid. This in not the case here in the South, where Christianity often goes hand-in-hand with Creationism, a pseodoscience to which I have a quite negative reaction, due to my strong and life-long fascination with, and respect for, real science.

There is also my personal history in play here. I have suffered horrible abuse (I’ll spare you the details) at the hands of Christians, often with the abuse having specifically religious elements. By contrast, no Muslim has ever even tried to harm me, in any way.

Most Americans, of course, think “terrorist” when they hear the word Muslim. The cure for this is simple: make friends with Muslims, and discuss this with them. You’ll learn that most Muslims detest organizations such as Al-Qaeda, and are quick to disavow them. The fact is, the Christian world has its share of such people as well; they’re the types of Christian who shoot doctors and bomb women’s health clinics. Extremists can be found everywhere, and the only reason extremists are of a particular type is almost always the same: a simple accident of birth.

Pick one hundred Christians at random, and its almost certain that you won’t find one fitting this description. Repeat this with one hundred random Muslims, and the odds against you finding a terrorist in your sample are also almost-certain.

Sometimes, people learn that I have a generally favorable view of mainstream Islam, and wonder why I don’t convert. That’s simple: I am unconvinced that any deity or deities exist, due simply to a lack of evidence, and one cannot be a Muslim without honestly believing that a single deity exists. However, I don’t need to be a Muslim to treat Muslims as actual people, and to fight the scourge of Islamophobia wherever I find it.

Unfortunately, there’s a LOT of Islamophobia out there — and it is, sadly, very strong in the loosely-knit community of atheists. I get asked, for example, to participate in “Everyone Draw Muhummad Day” on Facebook, every year. I always refuse. Is this censorship? No, it’s simply my choosing not to offend my friends for no good reason at all.

Throughout the years I have encountered many people who rabidly hate Islam, and they are usually either Christians or atheists. I try to reason with them. It usually doesn’t work, but sometimes it does, so I generally try it anyway. Hate doesn’t help anyone, and the more of it we can rid ourselves of, the better off all of us will be.

[Later edit: part II of this post may be found right here — https://robertlovespi.wordpress.com/2013/04/07/my-unusual-view-of-islam-part-ii/]