My husband’s interview with punk-mathematician Tom Henderson is being featured on Boing Boing. This interview has been getting a lot of attention, and rightly so. Tom has a much more engaging and practical approach to the type of abstract mathematics 99% of people struggle with (not me, though, I’m one of those jerks who always wrecked the curve and actually had FUN solving complex equations).
A nice, juicy excerpt:
Math for Primates started from the concept that there are certain things that humans are always interested in. Really, they like other humans. That’s the best thing. The internet used to just be a box with text, but once there was a critical mass of social information on it, it was a box with people inside! We love looking into boxes that have people in ‘em!
So, the concept I pitched to Nick was, “Let’s talk about math from the platform of ‘Math that humans are likely to want to know, because it’s about other humans’”
Social conflict. Sex. Beauty.
It gives us an excuse to talk extensively about game theory. And, game theory is a key place to teach humans mathematics, because we seem to have some optimized “cheat detection” in our brains.
Let me give you an example, it’s something like, uh…
There are four face-down cards on a table. There is a rule: “If the number showing is even, then the back of the card MUST have a vowel.”
Now, given an E, 3, 8, D, what is the smallest number of cards you need to flip over to verify that the rule is being followed?
Maybe I fucked up the puzzle. But, anyway, the answer as I’ve phrased it is NOT E and 3.
You need to make sure that 8 has a vowel on the back, and you need to make sure that D does NOT have an even number on the back.
Everyone gets this wrong, basically. Well, non-mathematicians always do, and I’m pretty sure I got it wrong because I get every answer wrong on the first try. Punk as fuck.
Now, if you ask the same people a logically equivalent question: “You see four people. Two are drinking beer and two are drinking coke. Whose IDs do you have to check?”
No one says you have to check the ID of the coke drinker. Because who cares how old they are? If it’s the same puzzle, but phrased as a problem of possible social cheating, we nail it.
Read the rest of this entertaining interview here.
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