What is the Most Valuable Benefit You Got from Becoming a Mathematician?

By Keith Devlin @KeithDevlin@fediscience.org, @profkeithdevlin.bsky.social

Having a media presence, I often get asked for a quotable answer to that question. I usually answer, “It taught me never to be sure I’m right.” Mathematics is unforgiving. If you made an error in your solution or your proof, you have only two choices. Correct the error or (and this is by far the most common outcome) admit you were wrong. And then ask yourself what you can do about it.

Giving up is usually to be avoided. The advice I generally give about how to get a PhD in mathematics is to accept being wrong over and over again for two years or more, until the one time you are right, and then you’ve got your doctorate. A math Ph.D. is a survival award.

I can’t speak for others, but for me, that ingrained habit of always being ready to question what I believe to be true has been by far the most valuable life-skill I got through mathematics.

Would that be true for the majority of our fellow citizens, and our civil and socio-political lives would be far less stressful and broken than they currently appear to be.

What prompted me to reflect on this now was an email from a colleague in the UK in which he provided the URL to an article in The Times (the UK one) from 2019, about an event that took place in 2000.

Reading that article (I link to it below), I realized there was a second valuable life skill I acquired through mathematics; although this one is not because I was a mathematician, rather that I became a member of an international community that extends over the entire Globe, with the only requirement for entry being your accomplishments in your chosen field.

Many countries are currently experiencing a wave of xenophobia, not least my own (America) and my birth-nation (United Kingdom), but it’s happening in pretty well every country I have spent time in and come to love. It’s particularly startling in the US, that is — or was until recently in my lifetime — universally proud to be “a nation of immigrants,” with an economy built on generations of immigrants. (I’m one of them.)

The aspect that makes this relevant to mathematics, is that we are truly a global community, and the work we produce draws on contributions from across the planet. Mathematics provides us a common bond of something that’s core to who we are.

It was in response to something I posted on social media (I forget what—it’s just social media after all) that my UK colleague alerted me to that old Times article. It begins (and this was in 2019, remember):

Nineteen years ago, the mathematics department at the University of Nottingham received an email from an asylum seeker who wanted to talk to someone about algebraic geometry.

They replied and invited him in. So it was that, shortly afterwards, Caucher Birkar, the 21-year-old son of a Kurdish peasant family, stood in front of Ivan Fesenko, a professor at Nottingham, and began speaking in broken English. That was when his life changed.

That opening got my attention right away! The writer, Tom Whipple, is an award-winning science writer; he knows how to tell a story. A couple of paragraphs down, he tells us why he was writing that particular story then, nineteen years later. That Kurdish asylum seeker had returned to Nottingham University for an event to celebrate his recently received Fields Medal, the mathematicians’ “Nobel Prize”.

You can read the whole thing HERE.

There’s a “math lesson” in this story that I think everyone could benefit from. But it’s hard getting people to take a math lesson.

The thumbnail image for this post shows the University of Nottingham.