Having played and failed at being a mathematician in yesterday’s “Diary,” I shall now try my hand at being an anthropologist. What are the characteristics of the tribe I am sojourning among at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute?
Well, for one thing, they look somewhat different from the ruck of humanity. A friend of mine captured this rather nicely. If you see someone walking about in the vicinity of a campus who looks as if he’s either very backward or very brilliant, she said, then, if he’s not very backward, he’s a mathematician.
By and large, mathematicians devote little effort to self-presentation. They let their eccentricities blossom. The theory is that this reflects the absolute certainty of their methodology. If you have proved a big theorem, then your importance as a mathematician is certified beyond question, now and forever. This is the sole criterion of professional success. By contrast, if you are in a field where fashion and politics dictate the canonical methodology—literary theory, say, or sociology—a great deal of attention must be given to cultivating your outward persona, since impressing your colleagues is the sole criterion of professional success.
That, as I say, is the theory. In reality there are at least a few mathematicians at MSRI who are sartorially impeccable, who even cut a bit of dash. And I, the journalist in their midst, am no Beau Brummel myself; indeed, today my toilette seems to be spoiled by the absence of a button on my sport coat.
There is one stereotype about mathematicians that I am happy to dispel: the notion that they tend to be crazy. It is unfortunate that two of the mathematical figures who have loomed large in the public imagination—the Unabomber and John Nash (about whom a Hollywood movie is in the works)—have had histories of clinical dementia. The impression that this is a déformation professionelle has been reinforced by middle-brow cultural products—like the current Broadway play Proof, about a brilliant mathematician who drifts in and out of schizophrenia.
I was developing this theme in a talk I gave at MSRI the other day (a little light relief between conclaves on number theory and C* algebras). Why is it, I asked, that popular culture ignorantly insists on linking mathematics and morbidity? As an example, I cited Jay McInerney’s novel Model Behavior. The narrator of the novel spends his time chasing after supermodels. He has a sister who is obsessed with the search for large prime numbers—and who, inevitably, is anorexic-bulimic. Now, that’s bad enough. But then I wrote on the blackboard the number given in the novel as an instance of a large prime: 2 raised to the 7,613rd power. Hey, wait a minute, I said—that’s no prime number!
Everyone laughed.
Feeling myself on a roll, I quoted the narrator’s next remark: “Large prime numbers aside, I’m wondering what the best strategy is for hunting petite models.”
Everyone laughed again, though more faintly.
Mindful of the importance of observing comedy’s “rule of three,” I then quipped, “Actually, a supermodel is also a kind of mathematical object, in that she can usually be reduced to her lowest terms by a series of propositions.”
Silence.
