Dana Mackenzie: It Would Be Weird Not To Love Math

Guess what – I wanted to be a writer! I wrote my first book at age 5, titled “The Littlest Inchwarm” [sic]. I would write the story and draw pictures, and my mother would type the stories and bind them between two pieces of cardboard.

One of my favorite hobbies is hula dancing. I joined the Hula School of Santa Cruz in 2006 and danced with them for more than ten years, often appearing in performances at the Seascape Resort and elsewhere. The “surprising” thing is that I’m male, and many people do not associate men with hula dancing.

But in fact, men have always danced hula – it was once part of the training for Hawaiian warriors. I appreciate hula because it is gentle on an ageing body, it has a very understated beauty, and it connects deeply to Hawaiian cultural and spiritual values. To read more about the experience of dancing hula as a man, check out my New York Times article.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Wikipedia got me interested. I have read very little African literature, only Alexander McCall Smith’s #1 Ladies Detective Agency series and Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton (an assignment when I was in high school). Those were written by white writers, so it’s possible to question whether they truly represent indigenous African voices (although they are great books and I recommend them).

I knew I had seen Things Fall Apart in the bookstore, but until I read the Wikipedia article I had never realized that it was considered a classic, the first work of truly African literature from the African viewpoint. I hadn’t even realized that it was so old. I figured that it had been written in the 2000s, not 1959. So I decided to get a copy, to fill in a hole in my education.

I’m still early in the book, but I love Achebe’s portrait of pre-colonial Igbo society. I’ve been studying Hawaiian culture and I’ve begun to appreciate how rare and elusive the information about pre-colonial societies, especially societies with no written language. There’s a short window of time when people are still alive who remember stories about the pre-colonial days, and who are at the same time proficient in the colonial tongue.

Achebe was writing during that moment in time. So I already like this book, and I understand from the Wikipedia entry (which I skimmed very quickly to avoid too many spoilers) that there is much more to come!

Quite literally, Judea was the inspiration. He is an amazing scholar, and did something that hardly anybody has the courage to do: He switched fields when he was at the peak of his profession. He made a tremendous reputation in the 1980s in the field of machine learning by inventing a method called Bayesian networks.

But then, around 1990, he came to the realization that this method left out a fundamental part of human understanding of the world—namely causation. He did a complete about-face and essentially stopped working on Bayesian networks in order to pursue this much more abstract goal of figuring out how causal logic works and how you would teach it to a computer. He was 30 years ahead of his time: causal AI is just becoming a hot topic today.

It was an incredible privilege to work on The Book of Why with Judea because he has such a wide-ranging intellect. He is part mathematician, part computer scientist, part data scientist, and part philosopher. Judea also has a unique, impish sense of humor that you would not expect from such a world-renowned scientist. And most importantly, he respected my contribution to the book as a writer.

He saw that I had an expertise that he did not – putting things in a way the general public will understand. Many collaborations between a famous scientist and a less-famous writer work out badly, but Judea was very generous and I will always be grateful to him for that.

I already mentioned Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. The other book that I purchased at the same time (and read first) was Black Hole Blues by Janna Levin. The two books represent different poles of my reading interests: sometimes I want to read a novel, and sometimes I want to read nonfiction.

Black Hole Blues is about the decades-long saga of gravitational wave detection, which was first achieved in 2015 by the LIGO collaboration and led to a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017 for three of the physicists who led the project. The way that black holes get involved is that most of the gravitational-wave signals detected so far are created by black holes colliding. It’s like the squealing of their tires as they complete their last few mad dashes around each other before squishing together into one large black hole.

I wanted to buy Black Hole Blues because I wanted to read the inside story of the detection and learn more about what the detections (plural because there have now been several of them) have taught us. I was disappointed but in a very interesting way. It’s very clear that Levin wrote the complete book (203 pages) before LIGO actually came online, and she mentions the triumphant conclusion only in an 8-page epilogue!

It’s a spectacularly flawed book from the story-telling point of view. It’s as if the last two acts of a Shakespearean play were condensed into a brief summary at the end—here’s what happened to Romeo, here’s what happened to Juliet, thank you for coming, goodbye.

However, what Levin does do extremely well is convey the many, many years of toil and conflict and uncertainty and disappointment that go into a major science project like this. For that one moment on the mountaintop, you have to suffer so much. That is the “blues” of the title. It’s probably an important message for science students to hear. But it’s very different from what I expected the book to be about!

It’s another childhood passion that I’ve been too obstinate to give up on! But no, I’d rather answer with a quote that I gave to a newspaper reporter after I won my first North Carolina state championship: “Chess is a work of art that two people combine to create.”

I haven’t read one that really knocked my socks off. They’ve all had at least minor imperfections. But I’ll say A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman by Lindy Elkins-Tanton. It is a courageous book and full of insights. Why the “hero model” doesn’t work for science. How to teach in the Internet age, when the answers are all available online. (Answer: Teach the skill of asking questions. That’s what we should have been doing all along!) How to deal with it when the morality police come after you. (I loved the word she invented, “pre-enraged” people.)

I also loved the story of her Siberian expeditions and the challenges she faced as a woman scientist, in a country (Russia) and a discipline (geology) where many people think that women “don’t belong” as scientists. And I’m just in awe of her accomplishments, achieved despite what some might consider to be a slow start to her career. It just goes to show that you don’t have to come out of college with your whole life planned out ahead of you. And even if you do, you’d better be ready to change the plan!

I’m not very good at socializing with strangers, so a three-course meal with anyone whom I don’t know is a little bit anxiety-producing. Also, someone like Leo Tolstoy might be a great writer, but rather a bore as a dinner companion. So I would choose a writer who is already a personal friend of mine. That narrows the list down to less than ten people, and I won’t offend any of them by picking one as my favorite.

On the other hand, if Tolstoy is available, I wouldn’t turn him down. I’d love a three-course dinner of Russian food. While he drones on about his religious views or his scientific approach to history, I’d sit next to his wife, Sophia Tolstaya, and ask for her thoughts about the pitfalls of living with a genius. That might be a very interesting conversation.

There is only one subject that I can be sure that both humans and aliens have in common: mathematics. I suspect that the aliens will also have a very good working knowledge of physics because they got here before we got to their world.

So I’m going to give them the following books.

Princeton Companion to Mathematics edited by Timothy Gowers, June Barrow-Green and Imre Leader, with an absolute superstar cast of article writers. This encyclopedia will give them a pretty good idea of what humans knew about mathematics in the early 21st century.

The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Richard Feynman, with Robert Leighton and Matthew Sands. At 1552 pages, this might take them a day or two to read! For half a century this has been considered a classic exposition of physics. The one small problem is that it doesn’t contain anything we have discovered in the last half-century, so the aliens might think that we don’t know about the Higgs particle or about topological quantum field theories. But there are probably lots of things they know that we don’t, so they won’t care about the addition of a few things here or the subtraction of a few things there. With that in mind, let me go to book number three…

Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems by Galileo Galilei. Written almost 400 years ago, at the very beginning of the scientific era. There is *so much* that Galileo didn’t know yet. Doesn’t matter. Nobody has ever been better at putting together simple observations into a brilliant and coherent argument, and of course, this book reduced the Aristotelian world system to rubble. The aliens will read Galileo and recognize a kindred spirit, and maybe they will decide that it’s worth letting humans live after all…

I’m not going to be able to pinpoint a single book. Instead, I’ll mention two book series that I devoured as a child. First was a series called “All About Books,” published by Random House. The series flourished in the 1950s and 1960s and kind of died out toward the end of the 1960s. They were science books for children, and I just loved learning about “grown-up” stuff. I liked impressing people by telling them things that children weren’t expected to know. Like Einstein’s formula, E = mc2, which I learned about from an All About Book and told to my third-grade classmates. That came to an end, though, when a fourth-grader asked me “What does it mean?” I didn’t know!

Anyway, the All About Books surely planted some seeds for my later career as a science writer. Second, Martin Gardner wrote several books that were compilations of his “Mathematical Games” column for Scientific American. I read these when I was junior-high to high-school age. He showed me a side of math beyond what I learned in school. After reading his books, it wasn’t weird to love mathematics— it would be weird not to love math!

I’ve written a proposal with Alex Kontorovich of Rutgers University for a book about Apollonian packings. These are foam-like arrangements of circles or spheres that turn out to have amazing mathematical structure behind them, and also a fascinating history that goes back more than 2000 years (to Apollonius, of course, a Greek mathematician).

Alex is one of the world experts on Apollonian packings. But the book is about more than just this one thing. It’s an experience, not specific information, that we’re trying to convey. We’re trying to give the reader an experience of mathematics that they haven’t had before. We show them some ideas that are very close to research-level math, that lead right up to it in fact, and yet it doesn’t look hard and sometimes it doesn’t even look like mathematics. It involves things like bubbles and mirrors and kaleidoscopes, which every kid loves to play with.

This proposal is turning out to be a hard one to sell. The first agent we sent it to turned us down, after sitting on the fence for a while, and we’re waiting for an answer from the second. I’m quite sure we would be able to sell the book to an academic publisher, and we might end up doing that, but that would be a slight defeat. Our goal is to reach beyond an academic audience, not just preach to the converted. But we’ll see what happens.

I don’t buy a stack of books and leave them on my shelf for a long time unread. At any given time, I have at most two or three unread books, and then I’ll get more when I finish those. So at this moment, my only unread book is The Memory Keeper of Kyiv by Erin Litteken. I want to know some of the backstories of this war between Russia and Ukraine. It seems crazy to me that two nations that share so much heritage are being forced to go to war.

Litteken is an American with Ukrainian grandparents, so she has the history in her blood and in her head. Also, the book was highly recommended by a historical-fiction writer whom I like a lot (Kate Quinn), and for an impulse purchase, those reasons were good enough. Now that I’ve mentioned it in public, I sure hope that it turns out to be a good book!