Suri, a math professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and Osherow, an associate professor of English at UMBC, co-wrote "The Mathematics of Being Human," a play that embodies the experience they had co-teaching a course on math and literature.
3 comments:
The performance that they described reminds me a lot of a play I once did a theoretical design for, I don’t remember the name, about the life and work of Buckminster Fuller. It talked vaguely about the mathematics and material sciences that he developed during his life, but always as they related to humanistic and philosophical concepts like altruism and solipsism. The play was composed entirely of abstract thought disjointed monologues, it was not particularly effective as a play. Only people that had a previous understanding of his mathematics and what a bucky ball is understood the scientific references and implications of the philosophies. I hope that this production does a better job of relating some of the really beautiful intricacies of mathematics to the beautiful intricacies of poetry. The fact that completely unrelated phenomenon in nature can be described by pi and e in some cases is really amazing, and should be accessible to everyone.
My first reaction is to respond to this article with a, "Yes, yes. This is all well and good, but at the end of the day, it doesn't change anything." While there is a poetry to math, and diverse uses for it, and different messages to convey using it, part of what makes math *math* is that is absolute, and immovable. The reliability of the fact that two plus two will always and unequivocally equal four is the very thing that makes math inhuman. Math governs humanity, which makes it inhuman. Now, making math more approachable is what I think this performance falls under. Indeed, they use two humans to perform and form the core of this sketch. The focus is not on math, but instead on the relationships humans can have with math. Math transcends humanity, so I - personally, of course - think people who claim that math is human are failing to distinguish between math itself and the relationships and applications of math.
I don’t always understand math. And before coming to Carnegie Mellon I assumed higher up levels of math just developed deeper into algebra. It never occurred to me that super advance math that make up peoples major goes more into proofs and understanding of the assumed rules of math. I was very happy to learn that there exists a professor out in this world who wants to shatter the glass ceiling perception of real math that I share and help the world understand how it relates to our humanity. The fact that he is educating through entertaining I think makes his lesson far more powerful. Too often I get the impression that people are turned off by the thought of going to lecture halls because they assume they are not really going to walk away feeling like they enjoyed it and were rather bored to death with a PowerPoint.
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