Six popular math authors, including me, did a round-table interview for the Notices of the American Mathematical Society about talking about math to the non-academic public, or, as the Notices calls them for some reason, “the masses.” What fun to be in this conversation with the people who have been at this a lot longer than I have! I like what Steve Strogatz says about precision:
“I would want to bring up the great probability theorist, Mark Kac, who said “Tell the truth, and nothing but the truth, but not the whole truth.” I think that works pretty well. Don’t lie. But you can leave some things out, and they can be in the notes at the end. I just worry that our training predisposes us to be really tight when it comes to writing for the public, because you do have to make little mistakes. Some people call it dumbing down. I wouldn’t, though, but it takes skill. If you really try to put in all the carping and the caveats that we’re used to, that’s going to be bad writing.”
As I said at the top, this is not a Marxist post — best I can do is to resurface an old interview I did for The Atlantic where I appreciate my Marxist art history professor from college, Howard Lay. (I wonder if he ever knew we called him “Frito.”) It looks like the Atlantic piece is behind a paywall, so if you can’t read it there, here’s what I said:
“I had an art history professor in college, Howard Lay, who was a Marxist critic, and who always reminded us that a painting was labor transformed into a physical object with the purpose of being bought and sold.
What was great about him was that he never talked about paintings as just marketable objects. His Marxism didn’t reduce our understanding of the paintings, it enriched it. An object for sale is only one of many things a painting is, but if you ignore the material circumstances of the painting’s production, you’re missing something about the painting that actually matters.
This stuck with me, and it affects how I think of the role in mathematics in the so-called real world. A legislative session is not just a series of numbers; a novel is not just a probability distribution of words; the Internet is not just a network with nodes and edges; but, still, they are mathematical entities, among all of the other things they are, and missing out on this means missing out on a valuable channel of understanding.”
Tagged art, marxism, popularization