Skip to main content

Ben Orlin - Five Way Interview

Ben Orlin loves math and cannot draw. He is the author of several bestselling books: Math with Bad Drawings (2018), the calculus storybook Change is the Only Constant (2019) and the infamously large Math Games with Bad Drawings (2022). He has taught every level of mathematics from 6th grade to undergraduate, and his work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, and Popular Science. His latest book is Math for English Majors.

Why math(s)?

My first passion is how people think. (Before I was a math major, I was a psych major!) So I view math, and especially math education, as a magnificent case study in applied psychology.

How do we braid together intuition and logic? How do we move from concrete details to abstract truths? What makes us build identities as 'a math person' or 'not a math person'? Every student I've ever taught had their own irreducible, irreproducible way of thinking about math. Nothing excites me more than learning how students think.

Why this book?

When I talk to mathematicians, they all downplay mathematical language. 'It's about the ideas,' they say, 'not the symbols.' Which is true enough!

But when I talk to writers, they love language. They've got favorite words, accents, etymologies, regional idioms... for them, the language is the raw material of literature, and it's fun to play with.

I wanted to bring that linguistic curiosity to math. Too often, the rules of our language remain invisible -- unspeakably obvious to experts, but unimaginably foreign to novices. This book is aiming to help both experts and novices see the language with new eyes.

Do you think if we were to redesign the language of mathematics from scratch, rather than the piecemeal form it now takes, it would be very different (and if so, how)?

Ooh, that's like pondering how evolution might unfold on an alien planet. The possibilities must be vast, but my imagination falters!

Maybe, freed from the strictures of typesetting, we'd design something more two-dimensional, like the triangle of power (which unifies logs, roots, and exponents) or the alien symbols in Arrival. Or maybe, because we perceive colors so vividly, we'd use them to carry meanings, like in Oliver Byrne's illustrated version of Euclid.

Still, I can only see mathematics through the window of our language. I struggle to envision what it'd look like from another vantage point!

What’s next?

This is my fourth book, and I'm excited to keep writing them. Several ideas are in competition for the next one:

1. A collection of the finest brain teasers that ever teased brains

2. A pilgrimage in search of mathematical beauty

3. True folktales of heroic calculations

4. Life wisdom from a probability-obsessed father (specifically, my father)

I invite readers to weigh in on the options! I am so suggestible and easily swayed that with sufficient pestering and flattery you can probably get me to write a book of your choice.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

My eldest is starting kindergarten; my youngest is starting to say her sister's name; I'm designing a new class on financial and civic mathematics; and less than 24 hours after typing these words, I'll be at the Minnesota State Fair eating grilled corn. In short: exciting times!

These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee:
Interview by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Art of Uncertainty - David Spiegelhalter *****

There's something odd about this chunky book on probability - the title doesn't mention the P word at all. This is because David Spiegelhalter (Professor Sir David to give him his full title) has what some mathematicians would consider a controversial viewpoint. As he puts it 'all probabilities are judgements expressing personal uncertainty.' He strongly (and convincingly) argues that while the mathematical approach to probability is about concrete, factual values, outside of the 'natural' probabilities behind quantum effects, almost all real world probability is a subjective experience, better described by more subjective terms like uncertainty, chance and luck. A classic way to distinguish between those taking the frequentist approach to probability and the Bayesian approach is their attitude to what the probability is of a fair coin coming up heads or tails after the coin has been tossed but before we have looked at it. The frequentist would say it's def

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on

Math for English Majors - Ben Orlin *****

Ben Orlin makes the interesting observation that the majority of people give up on understanding maths at some point, from fractions or algebra all the way through to tensors. At that stage they either give up entirely or operate the maths mechanically without understanding what they are doing. In this light-hearted take, Orlin does a great job of taking on mathematical processes a step at a time, in part making parallels with the structure of language. Many popular maths books shy away from the actual mathematical representations, going instead for verbal approximations. Orlin doesn't do this, but makes use of those linguistic similes and different ways of looking at the processes involved to help understanding. He also includes self-admittedly awful (but entertaining) drawings and stories from his experience as a long-time maths teacher. To make those parallels, Orlin refers to numbers as nouns, operations as verbs (though he points out that there are some flaws in this simile) a