Math and Magic

When I was in elementary school, I saw an entertaining movie titled Donald Duck in Math-a-Magic Land. It was intended to spark interest in mathematics among the young, and it came away, I believe, revealing perhaps a little more about the field than it intended. Although I barely understood anything that the duck said, the announcer came through quite clearly, especially when he told of secret societies in the ancient past whose members shared esoteric mathematical ideas with each other. This film was the first hint of what was to come in my education.

I have reached the conclusion over the years that mathematics is an academic field that is treated somewhat differently from the others. This difference shows both in the classroom and in the library. When I took any other type of class, be it history, Spanish, literature, chemistry, biology, social studies, etc., I could take any question pertaining to that field and do research in the library to answer it and probe more deeply into it. But the answers to many mathematical questions are hidden when one tries to find them in the library. It is as if the assumption is that the important thing about math is the training, not the body of knowledge on which the field is based. I suppose that it is also presumed that the only person looking for the proof of a theorem would be a student trying to “cheat” his way out of his “training”. In other words, math educators are overly concerned with getting inside the students’ heads and building up their “math power” than they are about opening up this field to comprehensive examination. This makes mathematics more like the wizardry classes in Harry Potter! And knowledge in Harry’s school, Hogwarts, was power, to be hidden from and simultaneously lorded over others. Mathematics is the real-world projection of magic in the way that it seems to be deliberately made as esoteric as possible, while at the same time it is the indispensable key to thoroughly understanding modern science and technology.

And yet very few in our society understand the advanced mathematics that is used in the design of all the handy gadgets we use. It’s no wonder that the cargo cults of the Pacific Islands that cropped up during and after World War II held as part of their creed that it was gods who bestowed the magic upon the Americans and British with their planes, ships, weapons, and radios. And if they worshipped these gods, so they thought, the cargo cult believers would receive all this high tech stuff as well. Gods? Magic? Wizards? This is the very image that is pushed about mathematics. For example, in the movie A Beautiful Mind, mathematician John Nash’s abilities in math were portrayed as being magic-like in nature. And, like the talent for magic in Harry Potter, there is the widely-held belief that, with mathematical talent, you either have it or you don’t; that was another characteristic of Nash’s story. Or, learning math is like climbing an enormous mountain, and you have to start at the bottom and struggle to ascend, step by torturous step. But why should becoming good, even at an advanced level, in math, be like either of these models? Within the content of mathematics lie strict rules of reasoning and logic. But the handling of this discipline as it is taught is anything but reasoned: it derives more from the historical background of secret societies, esoterica, and Gnosticism than is ever acknowledged.

People learn things in different ways. The way math is taught in schools straightjackets people into learning it only in the way that the “masters” want it learned. I think that if more creative ways were given for people to study math, it would help us as a people to become more literate in it. And that involves making mathematical material more readily available in libraries while eliminating the “wizard-training” nonsense going on in our schools regarding mathematics education.