One of my best friends from high school is a math major at Rice University named Nick. Sometimes we would joke that if we could find a third friend going for a chemistry degree, we could combine our majors and conquer the world. I always thought it funny that the two of us could have such divergent interests yet still be the best of friends. Naturally we still enjoy mocking each other’s fields of study to this day.
My friend always liked to tell me this story: a student comes to college convinced that he wants to major in math. He shows up to his first day of differential equations and his professor moves so quickly through the material that the student’s head is left spinning. After a few weeks, the student discovers that he no longer wants to study math because he finds the subject soulless and instead decides that he’d rather study poetry.
The student drops out of the class and switches his major to English. On the next class day the professor checks the attendance roster and asks if anyone knows where his former student is. When the rest of the class responds that he switched majors, the professor smirks and responds, “I knew he wasn’t creative enough to be a math major.”
It’s a clever and ironic story, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it actually has happened at many colleges. In recent months I’ve been pondering that anecdote a lot more though. It certainly hits close to home. In high school I had to be well versed in all sorts of subjects, from math to chemistry to literature to social studies, but I’ve known since I was 16 years old that I wanted to major in English in college.
Even though I was fortunate enough to have some excellent math teachers in high school, I could never make myself passionate about algebra or geometry. I mostly looked forward to taking my Calculus AP exam when I was a senior so I’d never have to take a math class again.
But about halfway through my Calculus BC course, I had a startling realization: I was enjoying math. Every derivative I took was like some new puzzle to solve. And when we started getting to integration, things got even more fun. My calculus class was easily 10 times more difficult than any of my other classes when I was a senior, but for the first time I really didn’t mind.
I enjoyed doing homework practice problems and studying proofs of theorems. I developed that passion thanks to my teacher, Peter Billingham, a modern-day Jaime Escalante (from the film “Stand and Deliver”). He taught me that math didn’t have to be a chore and with genuine understanding and comprehension could be just as intellectually rewarding as any other subject.
The most important thing I learned in my calculus class, however, was that the worlds of the logical and creative are not mutually exclusive. We hail literary masters like F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway as creative geniuses, but people like Newton and Leibniz were just as, if not more, creative, and the majesty of their theorems easily proves that assertion. We have this tendency to promote a false dichotomy between “left-brained” and “right-brained” people, but creativity can manifest itself just as much through a well-ordered differential equation as it can a short story by Cheever.
Mathematicians and scientists seek to do the same thing that philosophers, authors and artists do: explain why our world is the way it is. Though they might use equations and charts instead of typewriters and paintbrushes, it’s fallacious to assert that their work is “soulless.”
We can look at paintings or read poetry and immediately consider the works “beautiful,” so why can’t we say the same thing about the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus? Math, like all other facets of academia, works to bring us a higher understanding of the truth, and it deserves comparable appreciation.
Brandon is a sophomore majoring in English.
