Category: Society

Back when I TAed physics, I used to tell the students that a huge chunk of physics was simply having the gall to believe that you could get the answer. In other words, “confidence is key!” (Of course this probably also leads to the well known problem of extralusionary intelligence)
In this spirit, here is an article in the Washington Post about gender stereotypes and scores on a math test. In the 90s a series of experiments showed that if you made students identify their sex (or race) on an exam then this would cause their scores on math tests to change, causing, for example, females scores to fall. The thinking here, of course, is that recalling your gender might also recall the negative stereotypes which are place on females in math. Well what the Washington Post article describes is what happens if you do the opposite. What happens if you ask questions before the exam which remind the students of their postive attributes. Well, the WaPo reports that a recent study found that in fact in this case the male test scores stayed the same and the female test scores increased such that they were indistinguishable from the male test scores! Having the gall to believe you could possibly be smart is, indeed, it seems very important. (I had an English teacher in middle school who used to berate the students for making fun of people who were doing well in class. “Why wouldn’t you want to get good grades?” she would ask. Thanks Mrs. Perry!)

This interview with a Stanford professor (of neurobiology) about his experience as a woman in science is an interesting read (via Angry Physics.)

Among sports fans there is a lot of controversy about the use of performance enhancing drugs by athletes. Of course what exactly an performance enhancing drug is, is often left pretty vague. But most sports fans argue against the use of such drugs because they are, in some form, cheating.
So what do we do, for example, with Erdos. Paul Erdos was, for those who don’t know, one of the twentieth centuries great mathematicians. He was the author, amazingly, of over 1,500 different papers. It was well known, also, that Erdos used amphetamines. There is a famous story that his friends were so worried about his amphetamine use that they bet him that he couldn’t stay off the drugs for a month. Of course Erdos took the bet and successfully stayed off the drugs for the required amount of time. When he went to collect the bet, he reportedly said “You set Mathematics back one month!” (OK, this story is off the top of my head, the details may or may not be correct!) So, in a real sense, Erdos’ productivity was increased in large part by his use of a performance enhancing drug. So, was Erdos cheating? Should we think of his “records” his “theorems” as somehow being “less proved by Erdos” because of his use of amphetamines? Well I certainly would argue against this.
At FOCS this year I was having this conversation, and it came up that perhaps we shouldn’t penalize the result, because the outcome, i.e. the mathematical proofs isn’t really a competitive sport. But what about those who are competing for tenure? Now of course I’m disregarding the legality of the performance enhancing drugs. But disregarding this issue (which may just invalidate the whole argument, but bear with me) should there be drug testing of tenure track professors to make sure they aren’t using amphetamines to increase their productivity?

A biophysicalchemist sends me the following link from the San Francisco Chronicle Cal math lecture to feature binge-eating cartoon dad detailing a math program this Sunday at 2 p.m. at the MSRI in Berkeley on the Simpsons and math (I lived almost level with the MSRI in the Berkeley hills while I was a graduate student. Oh what a view!) Sounds like fun.
What is really funny, however, is what we find as examples of math and the Simpson’s being used together from the article:

Homer, in a dream, wrote that 1,782 to the 12th power plus 1,841 to the 12th power equals 1,922 to the 12th power. (It does.)

First of all, it wasn’t a dream. Homer had slipped into….the third dimension (which we define as that place where frinkahedrons exist, of course.) And second, well if what the author states is true, then Princeton mathematician Andrew Wiles would have quite a bit of egg in his face. Because the above statement would be a counterexample to Fermat’s Last Theorem (not to be confused with the other important FLT: Fermat’s Little Theorem.) which Andrew Wiles famously proved (well proved, and then they found an error, and then he fixed the error. Genius!) The statement of Fermat’s Last Theorem is that there are no positive integers, x, y, and z, such that x^n+y^n=z^n for n an integer greater than two. What is funny is that if you evaluate the two sides of this equation, they do agree in the first nine most significant digits:

1782^12+1841^12=25412102586…
1922^12=25412102593…

So if you type this equation into a caculator which only keeps ten digits of precision, it will fail (rounding that last digit to the same number, I think. For the actual program used to find this violation see here.) So it seems as if this joke, a “calculator significant digit” violation of Fermats Last Theorem, has caught its first victim. I’ll bet the journalist involved did exactly that: he just plugged it into his handy calculator! Well, maybe not, but still it’s pretty funny to think that this might have occured.