Gilbert Strang explains why people love math: the certainty of mathematical truth offers comfort against a messy world. He sees math as both a practical tool and pure art, and shares how counting once brought him peace.
On YouTube, just consuming a bunch of videos and just watching what people connect with and what they really enjoy and are inspired by. Math seems to come up again and again. I. I'm trying to understand why that is. Perhaps you can help me. Give me clues. So it's not just the lecture, the kinds of lectures that you give, but it's also just other folks. Like with Numberphile, there's a channel where they just chat about things that are extremely complicated, actually.
Yeah.
People nevertheless connect with them. What do you think that is?
It's wonderful, isn't it? I mean, I wasn't really aware of it. We're conditioned to think math is hard, math is abstract, math is just for a few people, but it isn't that way. A lot of people quite like math and they like to. I get messages from people saying, you know, now I'm retired, I'm going to learn some more math. I get a lot of those. It's really encouraging. And I think what people like is that there's some order, you know, a lot of order. And, you know, things are not obvious, but they're true. So it's really cheering to think that so many people really want to learn more about math. Yeah.
In terms of truth, again, sorry to slide into philosophy at times, but math does reveal pretty strongly what things are true.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the whole point of proving things. And yet sort of our real world is messy and complicated. Yes. What do you think about the nature of truth that math reveals?
Oh, wow.
Because it is a source of comfort, like you've mentioned.
Yeah, that's right. Well, I have to say, I'm not much of a philosopher. I just like numbers. You know, as a kid, I would you. This was before you had. You had to go in when you're. When you had a filling in your teeth, you had to kind of just take it. Yeah. So I. What I did was think about math, you know, know, like take powers of 2, 2, 4, 8, 16, up until the time the tooth stopped hurting and the dentist said, you're through or counting. Yeah.
So. So that was a source of. Just source of peace, almost. Yeah. What. What. What is it about math? Do you think that brings that?
Yeah.
What is that?
Well, you know, where you are. Yeah. Symmetry, it's. It's certainty. The fact that, you know, if you two. If you multiply two by itself 10 times, you get 10, 24, period. That's. Everybody's going to get that.
Do you see math as a powerful tool or as an art form?
So it's both. That's, that's really one of the neat things. You can, you can be an artist and, and like math. You can be a engineer and use math.
Which are you? Which.
Which am I?
What did you connect with most?
Yeah, I'm some between. I'm certainly not a artist type, philosopher type person might sound that way this morning, but I'm not. Yeah, I, I really enjoy teaching engineers. They, they, they go for an answer and. Yeah. So probably within the MIT Math department, most people enjoy teaching people teaching students who get the abstract idea. I'm o with. I'm good with engineers who are looking for a way to find answers. Yeah.
