Mathematics For Human Flourishing

Nov 22, 2022

I just finished the book "Mathematics For Human Flourishing" by Francis Su. I didn't know what to expect, but I needed to hear its message:

Believe that you and every person in your life can flourish in mathematics.

I was deeply moved (literally to tears) with Francis's correspondence with Christopher Jackson, a federal prison inmate who found meaning and purpose through math.

I also was touched by Francis's vulnerability sharing the hardships in getting his PhD. This describes a pivotal moment between Francis and his PhD advisor Persi W. Diaconis:

After I told him that I might leave, he said: I would rather you work with me than quit. It was an act of grace - undeserved kindness, indeed love, that he reached out to me. Through my soul-searching, I had already freed myself from the burden of needing the PhD to give me dignity. Now I was being offered a chance to come back to mathematics, this time for the joy of mathematics itself.

I've been attempting to get back into math, and I've been asking myself why I'm even doing it. Reading this book helped me find my answer, which I realized is the same reason that I do music: for the joy of music itself, not for how it looks to others.

I resonated with Francis's reflections:

Why do mathematics? Was it for prestige, some external good? Was it to prove that I was better than someone else at mathematics? Was it to compare myself to others? Was it for significance?

I'd been groomed by society to see math as a way of drawing a circle and putting myself in it, believing that math was a showcase for flaunting talent rather than a playground for building virtue.

I have an emotional past with math. From trauma in high school honors pre-calculus, withdrawing from linear algebra in undergrad, to almost failing linear algebra again in grad school, I wonder why I still have an inkling of interest in math.

This book helped me separate my academic failures from the moments where I experienced wonder and joy in math. Funny enough, most of these moments came from CS classes, e.g. Automata Theory, Algorithms, and Discrete Math.

I'm looking forward to learning math again not for a degree, not for applications to work, but simply for the virtues that math builds:

Exploration, Meaning, Play, Beauty, Permanence, Truth, Struggle, Power, Justice, Freedom, Community, Love

There are so many great quotes from the book. I'll end with this one:

As a mathematical learner, don't let yourself be sucked into an education that champions mathematics as pure logic, cold and heartless, a bunch of rules to follow. Who would want to learn that, or teach that? That is not where the heart of mathematics is. You cannot separate the proper practice of mathematics from what it means to be human.