The Lost Math of Storytelling
How math is drifting from tale to tool, and why we should stop it.
That mathematics is a language is all but forgotten for many. They may see it more as an evil incantation, a set of instructions, or a clinical description of objects and their properties-- and those are all involved, but the ability to tell a story in that language has been largely lost. Why? There’s a two-fold problem:
Math as an opaque, dry, pain in the ass leads to the inability to craft full stories
Math as a deductive framework leads to prioritizing answers over the journey
1. Missing the Craft
Mathematics is simply too scary for a large swathe of the population.
Math has terrible Public Relations, no kindly soft celebrity educators like Mr. Rogers or Bill Nye, no big splashing presences like Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking. The few that have tried to break in as personalities in pop mathematics have been unable to reach the heights of these others in terms of household name. That can largely be chalked up to Physicists (and Mr. Rogers) having it easier because they can appeal to the imagination: awe inspiring and sexy concepts like wormholes, time travel, QUANTUM (people love quantum), cats in boxes possibly dead or alive, light speed motion and its effects, and a magic train that goes to a Neighborhood of Make Believe.
But you know what? These are popcorn movie concepts.
They’re loud, bright, bombastic, fun.
It’s easy to tell a story about them.
It’s not so easy to tell stories about the subtler or seemingly more mundane aspects of any field, especially technical ones…and people’s multitude of prior bad experiences leave them unwilling to listen to the most basic and brief sound bites of information…but novels and films accomplish this all the time. Countless are the stories on page or screen about mundane situations that would sound like a real snooze fest in the elevator pitch. The way the scene is framed, the musical score, the investment in characters, the reader’s ability to imagine details, the anticipation,
the FEELING--
Scientists and Mathematicians would be selling “Lord of the Rings” like
“two small humanoids go throw jewelry into a volcano”
2. Missing the Journey
This second point is more for folks in these fields. Math is a deductive system, which roughly operates as follows: a set of primordial rules are chosen (called axioms), and then further truths are gleaned by combining these axioms (and combining the resulting truths), building up an edifice of true statements. Math has no theories in the way that science does, in the sense of well accepted but unproven ideas-- there are either things that are proven (often called Theorems) and things that are not (called…well, ideas).
The point here is that because one can arrive at an unquestionably right answer, the importance of such a special event overpowers the path used to get there. Beginner or hobbyist practitioners of mathematics will often get hung up on “the way you do this or that problem”. Part of becoming an expert (in math or storytelling) is understanding the power of shifting perspective, the power of a telling from new eyes. Mathematicians very often take a very complex problem and move it into a frame of reference where it becomes simple, solve it there, and then transform the answer to the original frame of reference. Entire worlds with amazing properties spun up and carefully, thoughtfully explored just to solve a single problem. It’s amazing!
And we come back from that expedition, having crossed back and forth between realities, interacted with things that can’t exist in our physical world, managed to bring something back through that portal…
and share nothing but the answer.
We must share the journey, the story.
Use it or Lose it
I write this because we’re in danger. In danger of the storytelling being lost forever as mathematics becomes a “technology” instead of a language. Imagine language being relegated only to the utility cases of “wet floor do not walk”, or limited to reflexive small talk: “enjoy your meal”, “you too”. Imagine language novelties like Pig Latin or Spoonerisms being the highest priority of Venture Capital while poetry, folklore, mythology, and song all fade into the past simply due to the involvement of effort.
I want to know what my kid’s generation could concoct if they were inspired to push the real boundaries of this language, to speak to each other in it, to dream in it, to joke in it, to entertain in it, to world build with it--
not to encounter it only as a desktop widget, as an inanimate tool, as a product.