 An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one says, I'll have a beer. The second one says, I'll have half a beer. The third one says, I'll have a quarter of a beer, at which point the bartender cuts them off, pulls out two beers, and says, come on guys, know your limits. Last week, I talked a little bit about meaning, and arrived at the conclusion that there is no objective meaning in the universe, just the meaning that we assign to it. However, there is a language that anyone can learn to speak, which does seem to contain some universal truth. I do mean universal in at least two senses. It both transcends all boundaries of culture so you really can talk to anybody, and it appears to be the language that the universe itself is programmed in. It's the soul of music and of the computer that you're watching this on, and it's the closest thing that we've ever discovered to real magic. Like if you get a bunch of people talking it together at the same place at the same time, you can send people to the moon. What's really crazy is that we give free classes in this language to every American student in the hopes that some of them will pick it up and become wizards, and yet three out of five Americans get stressed out when they see it. That's pretty crazy. More than half of United States citizens suffer from some symptoms of math anxiety. Like if I put some squiggles on the screen here that look like this, more than half of the people watching will feel some pang of anxiety, especially if I put an integral sign here. That's kind of bizarre, especially when you think of what math really is at its core. Counting. I mean mathematics is involved in a ton of really different stuff, but functions, limits, matrices, path integrals, all these things are, in practice, are ways to count more efficiently than sitting down next to a big pile of stuff and going one, two, three. You can get by in life just by brute force counting everything and never doing any math ever. Of course, the same could be said for knowing how to read and write or how to work a computer. But if you've ever bought four more gallons of paint than you needed to, or just hoped that you'd be able to find a way to get a giant couch into your apartment, or if you're not one of the less than 20% of Americans who can calculate how many square feet of carpet they would need in their home, knowing math can make your life a lot easier. So it's incredibly powerful. It's very simple in its most basic operation, and it's useful. If you throw in the fact that jobs which require some proficiency with mathematics pay way better than most jobs that don't, you've got to wonder, why are so many people afraid of it? Well, first, there's a cultural myth that there are some people who are just bad at math, that if you don't find mathematics intuitive from the onset, then you're out of luck and you should probably just avoid numbers wherever possible. I've talked before about how the idea that intelligence is an innate trait instead of a developed skill can actually prevent people from learning. So in that sense, it's really a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's also a relatively common sentiment that math is just pointless symbol manipulation according to arbitrary and unintelligible rules. And when you look at how math has historically been taught, it's not hard to see why someone might think that. One of the best arguments that I've ever heard for revising math education came from Paul Lockhart, a PhD who decided to go into K-12 education. He wrote a truly moving opinion piece entitled A Mathematician's Lament, which is now commonly referred to as Lockhart's Lament, which sounds like either a really awesome science fiction novel or Harry Potter fan fiction. I recommend that you read it yourself, but the opening in particular really resonated with me. Lockhart compares our current system of math education to trying to teach kids music by having them copy and transpose sheet music according to the rules of music theory. That's boring. That's tedious. Yes, professional musicians frequently need to transpose in the different keys in order to do their jobs, but forcing students to manipulate musical notation correctly is somehow going to teach them about music? That's missing the point. I mean, if you haven't watched any of Weihart's fantastic videos about fractals and squiggles and hydras, you should really go check them out right now, because that's really what pure mathematics is supposed to be about, finding out the answers to interesting puzzles. Does solving puzzles sound like the math that you learned in school? Unless you had a truly outstanding teacher, probably not. That's depressing. It's especially depressing when you consider that very few make it through the opaque symbol pushing with which we've made a very interesting and useful and fun and powerful art form of human expression. It's a little more than an exercise in rote memorization. There are a ton of squiggles that we use for doing math, and remembering what they all stand for in their relationships to each other can be a challenge, but the squiggles aren't what's important. What's important are the ideas that they represent. The bursts of prime numbers that we broadcast into space to try and contact alien life forms reference the exact same set of ideas as this 35,000 year old wolf bone with tally marks on it. It's a manner of thought that would allow futuristic aliens from light years away to communicate with a human being from the Stone Age. More than any other, it's a language that announces to the universe there is someone here who can think. So long as you can think and count. Regardless of what you've heard, you don't suck at math. If you've never tried to figure out an ideal method for packing boxes in the back of your car or how much ink you'd need to print the internet, it's entirely possible that you've never actually done math before. And as a guy who doesn't want someone with math anxiety to be the first person that aliens try to communicate with, maybe it's time to brush up on the Pythagorean theorem. Remember, if you can draw this triangle, then they know you're not food. Have you ever known someone who prides themselves on not knowing math? Have you ever tried to develop your own method for approximating pi? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah blah subscribe, blah share, and I'll see you next week.