Kepler, Courage, Grandbabies, and What We Don't Teach at College

G. H Hardy wrote in his A Mathematician's Apology "Real mathematics must be justified as an art if it can be justified at all."

Hardy looked down at the practical application of math. He considered physics and engineering beneath him - he wrote (paraphrased, because I can't find the quote on Google and don't want to read A Mathematician's Apology again, ever), "People who practice math to help them understand solving problems are inferior to people who practice solving problems to help them understand math."

My degree is in pure mathematics, not applied mathematics. It's the kind of math Hardy approved of. But my heart is firmly on the other side of Hardy's argument.

Math as an art is an act of selfishness, and although Hardy was brilliant, he was a jackass. Math can be justified in the lives it saves through modern engineering. Math can be justified by the satellites it puts in orbit. Math can be justified in the operating system of the computer or smart phone you're using to read this. Math can be an art - I love its simplicity and rigor - but it can be 99 other things, each of them easier to justify than math as an art form.

Hardy thought anything practical was better left to lesser minds - real mathematicians should only concern themselves with the beautiful nature of math. Unraveling the mystery was the reward of the enlightened, using what was unraveled to serve humanity was only useful because it secured funding.

The chair of the mathematics department at my college was a pure mathematician and a Hardy fan. He read my senior thesis a week before I presented it to the college and warned me to tone down the narrative and focus more on the math when I presented it.

I did the exact opposite. I got the longest standing ovation of the semester from my classmates and a C- from my professor.

Worth it!

Here, to the best of my memory, is the opening and the closing of the presentation I gave:

* * *

Before I start I want to ask each of you two questions. There aren't any right or wrong answers, Dr. Romo isn't in the back making notes by your names in his book. [Laughter] I want to ask these questions to get your heads in the same place mine is. I want us all on the same page.

First, what's the longest amount of time you've ever spent working on a single math problem?

Let's see some hands - hold up your hand if you've ever spent an hour trying to solve a single math problem.

Okay, that looks like everybody. No surprise. Now keep your hand up if you've ever spent two hours on a single math problem.

Still everybody. Well, we're all math majors here. Any other group of people and hands would be down already.

How about four hours? Keep your hand up if you've ever spent half a day working on a single math problem.

Couple of hands came down. How about a whole day? Who in here has spent an entire day trying to work out the solution to a single math problem?

Two days? About half of your hands are down now.

That's my record - two days. I spent an entire weekend getting my butt kicked by the area of a progressively curved surface because I kept trying to subtract everything left of the x axis instead of adding it. [Laughter] Those minus signs will kill ya! [Laughter]

Okay, how about a week?

Two weeks?

A month? Only Dr. Romo's hand is up now.

Okay, next question. Imagine you just spent nine years - nine years - working out the solution to a single math problem. And the answer you come up with is so revolutionary, so profound, it changes everything we know about the nature of the Universe. What kind of payment would you expect?

[Looking directly at one of the students] Matt, what's fair compensation for nine years of your life?

[Looks at a different student] David, what would you feel you've earned?

[David: A vacation! Laughter]

[Matt: Tenure!]

[Another student: A Fields Medal!]

How about your name immortalized? How about the Jensen Corollary? The Armstrong Postulate? The Romo Law?

I'm going to talk about one of my heroes tonight, Johannes Kepler. I'm going to talk about the nine years he spent working out the orbit of Mars from the notes he took while looking through a telescope in his patron's garden, every night, for nine straight years. And I'm going to talk about the cost.

Yeah, the cost. You see, Kepler wasn't paid for his nine years of work. He had to flee for his life when he published his findings. He was excommunicated and called a heretic and spent the rest of his life in hiding, hunted because he published findings that contradicted the official position of the Catholic Church.

In fact, as far as I can tell, after he published his results Johannes Kepler never got to look through another telescope for the rest of his life.

[I'm omitting the bulk of the presentation, which was about the challenge of deciphering the elliptical orbit of Mars while observing it from the elliptical orbit of Earth, at a time when both planets were assumed to orbit in perfect circles, and about the Catholic belief that the planets orbit in perfect circles out of obedience to the will of God and not in ellipses according to the law of gravity.]

I know it's been customary to applaud the student at the end of his senior thesis presentation, but I'm asking you not to do that tonight. I don't deserve it. I've sacrificed nothing to be here. Kepler sacrificed everything. It's wrong for him to be persecuted while I get applauded for revealing the same equation he did.

Dr. Romo read this thesis last week and told me to emphasize the mathematical process more. I've chosen not to do that tonight. This is your fourth year of studying the mathematical process - you don't need another lesson on that.

Instead, I chose to focus my presentation on Kepler's courage. Because we don't teach courage. We should, but we teach math instead. Let's be honest - the calculator in my pocket is better at solving math problems than I'll ever be. The world doesn't need more mathematicians, it needs more men and women of courage.

I'm acting on courage tonight. Johannes Kepler - I've spent the semester studying his story, and if all I got out of it was how to calculate orbits, then I missed the most important part. We must stand up for what we know is true, no matter the cost. We must be true to the data, whether the data supports the official narrative or not.

That's what courage is.

And the data I've studied this semester, the work and the conclusions of Johannes Kepler, is a profile in courage more than a profile in how to solve a math problem.

So against Dr. Romo's instructions I'm following the data to this single conclusion: Be courageous!

I asked you not to applaud for me tonight, but please stand with me as together we applaud the courage of Johannes Kepler.

* * *

I told that story because I've been writing about the traits my grandchildren inherit, but genetics is only part of it. It's the old question of nature vs. nurture - how much of who we are is because we inherited personality traits from our parents, and how much of it is because of how we were programmed by society and peer pressure? How much of it is our own choice and not just a learned response to stimuli?

I don't know the answer. Smarter people than me have spent decades arguing over it, and they don't know the answer, either. But I think it's only fair to give the other side of the story some space in this blog.

In other words, genetics aside, how did I become me?

The story I just told is one reason. I spent the semester studying Kepler's three laws of planetary motion, but what really stood out to me wasn't the laws themselves, it was the penalty Kepler narrowly escaped for publishing them. The more I learned the more I realized I'd be lying to omit the most important part of the story from my senior thesis.

To make a bold, dramatic gesture at the podium, gently but unmistakably calling out my professor for missing the point of Kepler's story and openly disobeying his instructions during my presentation, to emphasize the point he told me to downplay - the idea scared me.

But how could I learn about Kepler's courage and then play the coward? How could I watch Kepler follow the data to its only logical conclusion then shamefully do the opposite myself?

If I took the easy way out I could get an A in the class, no problem. But I'd have to live with my cowardice every day for the rest of my life, knowing I had the chance to touch my audience with something real but chose instead to give a talk that would make that jackass G. H. Hardy smile.

I think it's fair to say giving that presentation changed my life. It was the first time I really made a public stand for what I knew was right even though I knew there would be consequences.

And it turned out okay. My grade point average suffered for it, but I'm more proud of a 3.6 earned the hard way than the 3.9 I could have had by staying silent.

Some of my classmates went into data analysis, where their employers will want the data to tell a certain story. I hope they think of Johannes Kepler and change the narrative to fit their data, instead of changing their data to fit the narrative.

I think I'm writing this one for my grandchildren. Both of my grandfathers died young, before I got to know them. I never saw an example of how to be a grandfather so I'm making it up as I go. Maybe it shouldn't include transcriptions of college thesis presentations, but you guys can do it however you want when you become grandparents. If you don't like it write your own blog.

When I was a young man an old man told me "You spend the first third of your life trying to be who everybody thinks you should be, you spend the middle third of your life trying to be who you think you should be, and you spend the last third of your life just being who you are." I don't know if that's a universal truth but it's seemed true for me. It was only after I quit trying to be who everybody thought I should that I was free to be the man I thought I should be, and it was only after I realized I had no clue who I should be that I became who I really am.

You grandkids are too little to understand. The oldest of my kids were raised to be the kinds of people I thought they should be. The younger kids were raised to be the kinds of people they thought they should be. But I'm to the point now that when I babysit your cute butts I let you figure out who you are.

This blog is a clue, just like the Dear Grandson one and the Dad and Ben and Josh one. It's a clue to who you really are and what you inherit from me, either through genetics or through my example. It's something neither of my grandfathers lived long enough to give to me, which might explain why I feel obliged to give it to you now, years before you're old enough to understand it.

We are what we inherit, but we are also who we chose to be, until finally we just are who we are.

I hope after reading this you understand why I am who I am a little more. I hope you know that as much as I love math, the more important lesson I got out of my senior thesis was courage. I hope you realize how small a part my blindness plays in my life, and how much more important other things like courage and hard work and not giving up have been in defining who I am.

And I hope you know how much I love you.