 Take a moment think a think about a passion that you are excited about Maybe something other than mathematics or teaching Something comes to mind for you Now take a moment to discuss with your neighbor what it is that draws you to that passion. You got a minute okay, so think about the The things that draw you to your passions and why does the subject of mathematics? produce anxiety for some But joy for others. Why is that? What do some people see in math that other people don't see? And if you think about anything that you're passionate about There's usually something some basic human desire that draws you to those passions and for some math meets those desires and for others not so much and And unfortunately the teaching of mathematics has been disconnected from what it means to be human What it means to connect to some of these basic human desires that all of us have I Really liked this quote by Simone. They every being cries out silently to be read differently I've had the privilege of getting to know a prison inmate in a federal prison His name is Christopher. He's been in trouble with the law since he was 14 He had an addiction to hard drugs. He got involved in a string of armed robberies that landed him in prison at age 19 with a 32-year sentence and No chance of parole So when you think of who does mathematics, would you think of Christopher? And yet he wrote me this letter after seven years in prison and he said this I've always had a proclivity for mathematics, but being in a very early stage of youth and also living in some adverse Circumstances, I never came to understand the true meaning and benefit pursuing an education Over the last three years. I've purchased and studied a multitude of books to give me a profound understanding of Algebra one algebra to college algebra geometry trigonometry calculus one and calculus two now Christopher was writing me for help in Furthering his mathematics education So when you think of who does mathematics, would you think of? Somebody like Christopher and yet Chris has been on a journey. He's been exploring math with fresh eyes He's beginning to see that it's different from the dry and uninspired form of math that he'd been taught before He's growing in his knowledge and his love of the subject and his insights have inspired me as a Mathematician to believe even more fully that math has something to offer everyone Every being cries out silently to be read differently Simone Bay is a well-known French religious mystic and also a widely revered philosopher She's probably less well known as the younger sister of Andre vei who is one of history's most famous number theorists And for Simone to read someone means to interpret or make a judgment about them She's saying every being cries out silently to be judged differently And I sometimes wonder if Simone were crying out about herself because she too loved and participated in mathematics But she was always comparing herself To her older brother She writes this At 14 I fell into one of those fits of bottomless despair that come from adolescence And I seriously thought of dying because of the mediocrity of my natural faculties The exceptional gifts of my brother who had a childhood and youth comparable to those of Pascal Brought my own inferiority home to me I didn't mind having no visible successes But what did grieve me was the idea of being excluded from that transcendent kingdom To which only the great have access and wherein truth abides and I prefer to die Rather than live without that truth Now we know Simone loved mathematics because you'll see mathematical examples throughout her philosophical writing You'll find her in photos of borbaquie a group of french reformist mathematicians that included her brother Simone is on the left Pouring over some notes and Andre is waving the bell It's fun to look at this picture and just speculate What it was a like to be Simone among this group of Mathematicians I always wonder what her relationship to mathematics would be like if she weren't always in Andre's shadow Every being cries out silently to be read differently Now you might look at me a mathematician and think my relationship to math has always been solid that maybe you think I've never struggled in math But I grew up in a small rural town in south Texas with limited opportunities. This is my this is me with hair Most of my high school peers didn't attend college I didn't there weren't a large number of math courses available to me I had supportive teachers who encouraged me in high school and in college and managed to get admitted to Harvard for my phd But I felt out of place there because I didn't come from an ivy league school like many of my peers And I didn't take a whole slate of graduate courses before I entered graduate school So I felt like Simone Standing next to future andre's thinking that I would never be able to flourish if I were not like them And I was even told by one professor that I didn't have what it takes to be a successful mathematician And that caused me to wonder why in the world was I even bothering To go to graduate school mathematics. Why was I studying mathematics? Why do mathematics? That's essentially the question that I want all of us to think through today Why do mathematics? Why is Christopher sitting in a prison cell Studying calculus that he won't use as a free man at least for another 20 years Why was Simone captivated? by mathematical transcendent mathematical truths And why should anybody persist in seeing herself as a mathematical person? When others are telling her and subtle and maybe not so subtle ways that she doesn't belong And of course society today is even asking this question What is relationship to mathematics should be is math only a tool to make you quote college and career ready so that you can go and achieve your real aims in life or is math unnecessary for most of us and Only there for the elite few And why study math if you'll never use what you're learning right, if you think a little bit about some of the The amazing Interesting jobs that use mathematics today much of that mathematics didn't exist 20 years ago So why study math if you'll never use what you're learning these questions will rise because math is often only seen as a tool A means to an end something you'll use later Rather than a pursuit that serves you well right now And so when kids ask when will I ever use this? What they're really asking is when will I ever value this? And they haven't seen that that uh, they're equating value with utility because they haven't seen that they can value anything more And yet in a florida prison Christopher has never asked When will I ever use this? He's pouring over textbooks learning math in hopeful anticipation of its own intrinsic rewards So if you ask me why do mathematics? I would say this Because mathematics helps people flourish Mathematics is for human flourishing So when I say human flourishing what I'm referring to is a certain wholeness of being and doing Of realizing one's potential and helping others to do the same of acting with honor and treating others with dignity Of living with integrity even in challenging circumstances. So it's not the same as happiness And it's not just a frame of mind One way that people have thought about human flourishing is the well-lived life What is the well-lived life and the greeks had a word for human flourishing eudaimonia Which they viewed as the overarching good in life the well-lived life Is a similar word in hebru shalom Which is often translated peace But the the word has a far richer context to say shalom to someone is to wish that they would flourish and live well And arabic has a related word salam And a basic question taken up by people like you and me throughout the ages is How do you achieve human flourishing? What is the well-lived life The greek philosopher Aristotle would say this that flourishing comes through the exercise of virtue And one way to think about virtue is excellence of character that leads to excellence of conduct So there's a being aspect and a doing aspect And so virtue includes more than just what you think of maybe moral virtue Right. So for instance courage and wisdom are also virtue patience perseverance. These are also virtues And and what I hope to convince you of today is that the practice of mathematics when done properly Builds in us virtues that help people flourish and these virtues serve you well no matter Where you go or where your life takes you? We can give better answers to the question. Why do math? As math teachers we can give better answers to that question These virtues serve you well No matter what profession you go into and the movement towards virtue happens through these basic human desires these longings that all of us have And these are the desires that can also draw us to do mathematics So what I want to do today is just go through talk about Seven basic human desires that all of us have And the first of these is exploration When I was a child I loved the stars and the rural town where I lived deep in Far from any big city. I could see even the dimmest ones I begged my parents for a telescope, but we didn't have the money So I devoured books on astronomy and I dreamed about space And as a child of the 70s My imagination was stoked by the journeys of the voyager probes Through the solar system And I saw pictures like these printed in the papers You see exploration is a deep human desire and it's a mark of human flourishing and I could explore these worlds Even from a small town in south texas 900 million miles away And mathematical exploration is very much like space exploration But of a different kind of space A space of ideas You don't know what you'll find when you start you send out probes to test theories You're captivated by mystery. You're motivated by questions. You're unfazed by setbacks And you make discoveries from a distance because the ideas themselves are not physical You explore this space through reason And exploration is at the heart of what it means to do mathematics And you don't need a lot of resources except your mind to be a math explorer And as a result you can embark on an adventure from anywhere A prison A small rural town or some far-flung corner of the earth And exploration cultivates in us virtues like imagination and creativity Many of the Exciting things that we use on a day-to-day basis these days it didn't exist 10 or 15 years ago Are a result of mathematical exploration In order to solve problems you have to ideate new possibilities and math lovers love to dream up new ways of visualizing patterns And begin to envision the hidden structures That underlie everything we see We as teachers are equipping students to see hidden structures that underlie all that Happens around us and exploration cultivates in us another virtue one of the most important virtues the expectation of enchantment You see explorers are excited by the thrill of finding the unexpected especially things weird and wonderful Right, it's why hikes through unfamiliar terrain and tices It's why unexplored caves beckon to us. It's why the strange creatures of the deep sea ocean floor fascinate us What else might be lurking down there? And in math it's the same way When we take a sponge a manger sponge like this that's fractal with squares self-similar squares at all scales And we slice it diagonally And we find a bunch of hexagonal stars We are surprised We are enchanted We are amazed And we learn as math explorers to expect enchantment around every corner which makes math exciting to learn And that's what keeps us coming back for more So what would it be like if as we learn math or teach math We opened ourselves up to enchantment if you think math is about memorizing things and Not making sense of things and of course you're going to think it's dull and boring But for christopher math isn't a tool It's hidden treasure And at every opportunity we need to counter the idea that math is memorization And replace it with the idea that math is exploration A math memorizer doesn't know how to react in unfamiliar situations But a math explorer can flexibly adapt to changing conditions A math explorer knows how to innovate So how do we teach exploration? We'll just offer one idea Change dull problems that you assign To exploratory problems You know asking students to compute things may be necessary, but it's Rather dull How can we change the questions we ask so that they're exploratory? How can we make them open-ended? I like to uh to ask questions that begin. What happens if Is it better to Do this or this? Here's a question simplify this expression Ah, not so interesting Important maybe to to know how to do not so interesting How can we reframe it? Two numbers sum to ten. How can you make their product as large as possible? What's a more exploratory way of framing the question? What patterns do you notice? This is really popular these days for Teachers to say what do you notice? What do you wonder? That's inviting students To explore it's meeting that basic human desire to explore All right, take one minute discuss with your neighbor other ways that you can make your teaching space an exploratory space One minute. How can we make? Our teaching spaces exploratory spaces, how can we Train our students to expect enchantment around every corner Another basic desire Is play think about all the various kinds of play that we engage in as human beings sports play music play word play beach play One of the first activities we engage in as babies is to play Right and plays may be hard to define but we can think of a few qualities that characterize it for instance play ought to be Fun, otherwise it wouldn't be played but there's lots of other Qualities of play as well. There's usually some structure to play like the rules of a game or musical chords There's usually some freedom within that structure to create And that freedom leads to some sort of exploration of some sort like in jazz It's called improvisation in sports. It's the way the game unfolds as Each that's different each time it's played Play is often whimsical There's no great stake in the outcome and the investigation that you do often leads to some sort of surprise That enchants us like a discovery or a satisfying pun in word play or a thrilling end to a football game Of course animals play too, but what characterizes human play is the enlarged role of the mind and the imagination Think about the game set or any other game that you play How many people have played this game set? I'm sure this is a popular crowd for set There's interplay between structure and freedom. There's no great stake in the outcome But there's investigation that can lead to the delight of finding sets of matched cards And mathematics makes the mind its playground. We play with patterns. We play with ideas. We explore what's true And we enjoy the surprises that happen along the way All right, there's even a whole area of mathematics known as recreational mathematics Is there another field that has a recreational sub-discipline? My chemist friend said to me well, there is recreational chemistry And math play builds on us virtues that enable us to flourish in every area of our lives For instance math play builds hopefulness and concentration When you sit with a puzzle long enough you are actually exercising something you're exercising Hope that you'll eventually solve it math play builds in us the ability to change perspective Just like in gameplay when you analyze a situation from multiple points of view yours and your opponents And imagine possibilities Math play builds on us perseverance just as weekly soccer practices make us fit to Play that next game make us stronger for the next game weekly math Investigations make us stronger make us more fit for the next problem Even if we don't solve the current problem Play is part of human flourishing and you can't flourish without play so as we teach math Let's make room for questions for investigation for a surprise for imagination Let's de-emphasize the role of grades. I like to say that they're just a measure of progress. They're not a measure of mathematical promise Let's focus on the process of doing math not just focusing on the outcome of a calculation I like this question. I usually ask at the end of every class What have you learned in this class about the process of doing or creating mathematics? I get some of the best answers to these questions How do we make math a playful sport not a performance sport? So play isn't just playing games in the classroom. It's actually thinking intentionally about how you structure a class So that it has elements of surprise investigation freedom structure Take a moment one minute think about how you can make your class a playful space One minute Play is a fundamental human desire Another basic human desire is the desire for beauty Who among us doesn't enjoy beautiful things a beautiful sunset a sublime sonata a profound poem An illuminating idea You can experience The joy of mathematical beauty even if you don't know much math you may first see it in Striking patterns governed by mathematical laws that are as beautiful as a sunset The turbulence under an airplane wing fractal patterns and cauliflower Ripples in sand mathematicians study all of these things But you don't need to know much advanced math to simply ask a question why And why is the most fundamental mathematical question when you begin to study math You witness a more sublime kind of beauty The beauty of a formula that seems to connect surprisingly under related things Or the simplicity regularity order of the laws of the universe. These are called beautiful They feel transcendent because we feel like we're witnessing something About the nature of the universe and many people have asked this question Why should math be as powerful as it is to explain the world? Noble prize-winning physicist Eugene Wigner said ask this question and said this The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of math to the formulation of the laws of physics Is a wonderful gift Which we neither understand nor deserve Einstein said how can it be that math after being after all a product of human thought independent of experience Is so admirably adapted to the objects of reality And you know mathematicians try to understand why something is true by producing proofs But we're we're not just satisfied by any old proof of a theorem. We often look for the most pleasing theorem We have a special word for that most pleasing proof. We have a special word for this. We say a proof is elegant Paul adarsh often spoke of the book that god keeps in which all the most elegant proofs of theorems are kept And pursuing mathematics for its beauty cultivates in us the virtue of reflection When you contemplate beautiful ideas just like you'd contemplate a beautiful forest it leads to joyful gratitude and transcendent awe And when we see an experience profound beauty from seeing the same idea everywhere We begin to build in us another virtue Habits of generalization because we begin to expect overarching patterns everywhere And so when I learn a new theorem, I often ask what gives this idea its power What's the underlying principle? How might it apply to a more general situation? In such habits carry over to other areas of my life When i'm cooking a stir fry and i'm learning a new recipe. I often ask what general principles Are in this recipe because you know what? I don't want to have to memorize recipes I'd rather understand the principles add garlic and chopped onions first Put in basil at the end or it's going to lose its color In this habit of looking for general cooking principles or mathematical principles enables you to improvise new delights So if math is for human flourishing we have to help others see its beauty If you're interested in seeing some of the ways that I like to do that I have this website called math fun facts which I've used I basically archived a bunch of five minute Fun facts that I can present the beginning of a class to show some of the beauty and delight of mathematics So how do we teach beauty? We have to make space for this in our classes make space for reflection What striking patterns do you see in the world around you? It's a question you might ask We have to motivate beauty in diverse ways that in the mirror the diverse ways that people might come to math through art Through expressions and culture through patterns through rigorous arguments through the applicability of mathematics I like to think of beauty in four different ways There's there's the beauty of the sensory beauty the beauty of physical objects There's wondrous beauty the beauty of ideas There's insightful beauty the beauty of reasoning and then there's this transcendent beauty when you begin to see The same idea everywhere Take a moment and Discuss how you might Teach beauty in your math classroom justice Is another basic human desire This is a full quote from Simone Vey justice to be ever ready to admit that another person is perhaps something completely different from what we Read in him every being cries out silently to be read differently My favorite Chinese restaurant Serves authentic Chinese cuisine Just like my parents used to make and when you order an entree They give you a little appetizer and dessert as well and it's a bargain So I don't complain that the appetizer and the dessert which is jello Aren't themselves authentic Chinese cuisine But one day I went there with a Chinese speaking friend and when the appetizer came it wasn't these little crunchy noodles But it was delightful delectable pickled cucumbers Yet my friend had made no special request And when the dessert came it was red bean soup just like my parents used to make My favorite when I was a kid Why hadn't I gotten this before and I began to see a pattern when I came with non-Asian friends I would get the crunchies and the jello But when I came with Asian friends, I would get red bean soup I get the good stuff without even asking And then I noticed that my Chinese friends were also offered a completely different menu a secret menu With the more authentic dishes and I looked around the restaurant I'd be held a bizarre sight people side by side in the same place having completely different experiences non-Asians ordering from a standard menu and getting jello, but Asians Ordering from the secret menu and getting red bean soup And even when I asked for this menu, I'm often told No, no, no, no, no, you won't like the stuff on that menu Because even though I'm of Chinese descent the waiters to the soon because I speak perfect English That I must not be interested in the authentic Chinese food Now why do I bring up this example? It's because mathematics classrooms and math and and uh spaces mathematical spaces in the home Can be like this restaurant Whom do we allow a peek at the secret mathematical menu? With whom do we share our mathematical delights? Puzzles games toys Whom do we let into our information circle about mathematical ideas? Whom do we shepherd towards taking more math? Oh, you should major in math And whom do we discourage away from the mathematical professions? What conscious or unconscious assumptions are we making? You see justice means treating people's fairly and it's it's required for human flourishing We flourish we experience shalom When we treat others justly and when we are treated justly ourselves And some on they realize that correcting justice must involve changing how we view others So if you believe that mathematics is for human flourishing You'll see if you look around at the demographics of the STEM professions that they don't look like the demographics of America Right, we kept whole segments away from the flourishing that's available in mathematics either by lack of access or explicit messages of disapproval and we often don't even realize We're doing it For instance these days i'm used to being at math conferences and seeing a sea of white faces So even i was a little bit surprised when i was elected president of the mathematical association of america That a blogger prominent blogger on race issues for asian americans wrote a blog post about it And his name is angry asian man He's angry An angry asian man looked at photos of the past maa presidents on the website and given how many asians He expected to see in math. He noted that they were all white except for me and wrote a sarcastic post entitled Finally an asian guy Who's good at math? You see the dominant narrative about asians is that asians aren't leaders So what other assumptions do we make about other people groups? Now if you'd like to begin a conversation About some of these issues with your colleagues or your students and you don't know where to start I'm willing to help. I've written a number of articles I can be that third party to introduce some of these ideas and these are all posted on my website You see to teach justly means to become mindful Of other people's experiences the way their own personal experiences intersect with mathematics Are going to be very different than our own There's a great book that just came out recently called living proof, which I encourage you to to get I think it's even free From the maa and ams living proof stories of resilience along the mathematical journey It's a it's a really great way to understand the experience of Experiences of a number of people the pdf is available online for free We have to learn about what it means to teach inclusively. How do we reach all students not just the ones that seem to be performing? We have to be mindful in our classroom who is allowed to speak and who gets shut down We have to affirm the things that students bring to our classes The ideas that they present So to seek justice and mathematics builds on us virtues Among them a concern for the marginalized and a willingness to challenge the status quo Because when we begin to see how our experiences are different from our neighbors We will want the secret menu for everyone. There's another basic human desire freedom Maybe you don't associate freedom with with doing math, but there are many freedoms that we take for granted as math teachers The freedom to imagine The freedom to explore the freedom of understanding These are freedoms that are not there for all of us I've had a rich correspondence with my friend christopher in prison about freedom And he's made some astute observations He said this at his most basic level freedom is the ability to act without fear But as he came to understand from playing chess and he's an excellent chess player by the way Freedom is also about knowing all the options available to you Another player can dominate you and control you by limiting your options on the chess board He said this it's a sign of a skilled chess player that he or she can play well out of any position or circumstance on the board The person who is unaware of his or her options is like a player who's in a bad position Because even if there are fruitful paths available to you that you are not aware of They may as well not exist This is like if a player finds himself with two bishops against a lone king But doesn't know that two bishops can checkmate He or she will call a stalemate But when this person is shown educated That two bishops can checkmate they will always recognize the situation as a win And this is in my opinion the main bridge of education to take people to a place where they can recognize the pathways to success By climbing our visions of ourselves education allows us to transcend ourselves and thereby help others to do the same This is from christopher you see If you have pursued the freedom that mathematics brings that understanding brings You build resourcefulness. You begin to have hope that problems can indeed be solved We take that for granted But not everybody has that hope that problems can be solved Depending on the circumstances you grew up in With life challenges that are that may be seem insurmountable It's not clear to everybody that problems can be solved. We can give people the hope That problems can be solved. You become fearless in asking questions You become an independent thinker by pursuing mathematics in this way Pursuing mathematics is a way to become a freer human being So how do we make space for freedom in the classroom? I'm reminded of bell hooks who spoke of The difference between education as the practice of freedom And education that merely strives to reinforce domination So some of the ways that feel like domination to students is Doing exercises without understanding being told there's only one right way to do things Noticing other people getting treated differently feeling like you constantly have to prove yourself Because you are from a marginalized group By contrast what feels like freedom being allowed to play with ideas to brainstorm be given choices and how to solve problems Having a teacher that believes in you And really beginning to understand Take a moment and think about other ways in which you can encourage An atmosphere of freedom in your class Freedom freedom is a basic human desire How do we make spaces in our classroom not just to help our students feel freer? How do we articulate to our students that we are Enabling them to become freer human beings Community is another basic human desire and I love this quote by parker palmer To teach is to create a space Where the community of truth is practice To teach is to create a space where the community of truth is practice What he's saying is teaching is not just a one-way transmission of information Good teaching takes place in a community You see you you can't flourish in mathematics without a supportive community A community of people who open up With each other who share life together who share math together who share joys and sorrows Hopes and fears and the community helps us normalize struggle Because struggling is such an important part of what it means to do mathematics Community helps us normalize struggle and realize that we're not alone in our struggle And doing space means making space doing math well means making space for community But we have to be mindful that math communities are often too focused on achievement And it's often a narrow one-dimensional kind of achievement And hierarchies begin to get reinforced when we rank people according to some singular ability And this works against community We do this when we think there's only one way to be successful in mathematics And i'm i'm guilty of this too throughout my life in grade school people look to speed as a measure of math ability Those of us who do mathematics professionally realize that it's actually not being fast. That's important. It's it's being slow It's thinking deeply about simple ideas And there's many more ways to show growth in mathematics In high school it looks like rushing to take calculus as if calculus is the only mark of what it means to be good at math We have to develop multiple pathways into mathematics It doesn't have to be calculus in college. It looks like this people think if you don't start in an advanced place math class You'll never be good enough to major in math For professional mathematicians it looks like thinking that the only important dimension To doing mathematics is b is the number of papers that you publish This happens so often in professional math communities people evaluating each other based solely on a resume See too often we think of math as a pole in the ground and there's only one way for the vine to grow up the pole In reality mathematics is much more like a trellis And as a vine you can find your way up the trellis at multiple places where it meets the ground And you can grow in multiple directions And so all of us especially as math teachers have to fight this one-dimensional view of mathematics in the classroom And in the home we can praise others for the virtues Cultivated by mathematics and remind people that this is part of what it means to do mathematics as well persistence curiosity imagination habits of generalization The expectation of enchantment a disposition towards beauty These are all fundamental parts of what it means to do mathematics These are all ways to evidence growth in mathematics How can you change your assessments in your class? So that it measures growth in virtues not just growth in calculations How do we design group work well so that the contributions of everyone in the group are important for the group to succeed You see community helps us see one another's humanity and this is a huge part of doing mathematics And by practicing math in this way we build in ourselves virtues like hospitality In welcoming new people to mathematics Vulnerability when we share our own struggles and normalize that struggling can be an exciting part of doing mathematics These things should be part of a mathematical education as well We develop a disposition to affirm others and build our ability to give attention to people in a deep way How do we make this part of the mathematics classroom? This should be part of doing math too So don't let anybody tell you that math is just pure logic cold lifeless A bunch of rules to follow Because who would want to learn that? And who would want to teach that that's not mathematics You can't separate what it means What the the true practice of mathematics from what it means to be human Right because we're we're not just mathematical machines We live We feel We Breathe We bleed And if you want to learn math well, you have to see how math connects to the things that you long for the things that all of us Have deep within ourselves The things that matter to us the underlying longings that drive all of us for exploration for play for beauty for justice for freedom For community So here's a challenge for each one of us today and this goes for myself as well believe that you All of your students and everyone in your life Can flourish in mathematics Who will you read differently? See this is a challenge for me too because I've written off kids I've fallen short of this ideal because I don't have The imagination that I need for the sacred responsibility of teaching You might have a Christopher in your class who's fallen in with drugs in the wrong crowd Seems it doesn't seem interested in math. Maybe he even seems lazy, right? If if you knew what he was going through You might see him differently Six years after he wrote me that first letter from prison. He's now helping other inmates To learn math to get their geds He's using the meager income that he makes to buy math books and he's studying topology in advanced analysis now He says this i'm studying anywhere between three to five hours monday through friday and two plus hours on saturday and sunday Depending on how i'm feeling It's harder to study and read here because you're not in a traditional cell with a cell door that you can be enclosed in But everything is open and we live in a open eight by ten foot cube With walls that extend six feet off the ground and a three foot gap in the eight foot side to act as your door Also, i'm in a room without a desk So I have to take two chairs to do studying in But hopefully that will change soon because i'm in the works of trying to move to a cube With a desk But I can't complain too much. I grab my earplugs my two chairs and I go to work Nobody would call him lazy or disinterested now Would I have had the imagination to see a math future for him? 15 years ago Believe that you and everyone All of your students can flourish in mathematics Because what i'm asking you to do is something you already know is at the heart of good teaching And that's the center of every virtue and anything important in our lives I'm asking you to love You see love is the greatest human desire and to love and be loved is the supreme mark of human flourishing because it serves All the other desires for exploration for play for beauty For justice for freedom And it is served by them love is the source of and the end of every virtue Every being cries out silently To be read differently every being cries out silently to be loved Christopher in prison wasn't just looking for mathematical advice. Was he? He was looking for connection. He was looking for somebody to see him in his mathematical space and say Yes, you belong here with me And when I was in the depths of graduate school struggling against professors who thought that I would never succeed One professor reached out to me When I was thinking about quitting It said, you know, I would rather see you work with me than quit So I stand before you to ask you who will you love? Who will you read differently? Simone day after wrestling with her own insecurity in mathematics Saw that there was a path to virtue Through her struggle this lifelong struggle she had She wrote this the love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him What are you going through? It's a recognition that the sufferer exists Not only is a unit in a collection or a specimen from the social category labeled unfortunate But as a man exactly like us who is one day stamped with a special mark by affliction For this reason it is indispensable. It is enough but is indispensable To know how to look at him in a certain way This way of looking is first of all attentive The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself The being it is looking at just as he is in all his truth Only he who is capable of attention can do this So it comes about that paradoxicals it may seem a latin prose or a geometry problem even though they are done wrong May be of great service one day provided we devote the right kind of effort to them And should the occasion arise they can one day make us better able to give someone an affliction Exactly the help required to save him at the supreme moment of his need See she had found a path through struggle to virtue And she understood that mathematics is for human flourishing And i'll end with this reflection from max who wrote me after reading a version of my talk online He said this i just finished reading your wonderful article and felt compelled to reach out with a small personal story When i was in second grade and struggled with subtraction i struggled with subtraction i asked my teacher for help She snapped told me some mean-spirited equivalent of you need to go figure this out because it isn't hard And i returned to my desk feeling like the biggest idiot i barely I barely asked for math help after that and struggled for mediocre grades in college But in college i fell in love with an aerospace engineering major And hurt yes that can happen And her deep understanding of mathematics was almost intimidating And at the same time i discovered a passion for economics and through that math's ability to elegantly explain complex phenomena I only have an undergrad degree, but i've managed to work in applied math ever since graduating and today I do time series analysis in health care If only i could tell eight-year-old me of this trajectory Discovering the beautiful intersection of math and the humanities will always have a special special place in my heart And i love to share it with others the path i've been on has shaped my perspective that anyone Regardless of gender ability race or otherwise can be part of this wonderful thing You see math can be so much more than what we make of it When we see how it's connected to our basic human desires And if that really is the case that math is connected to basic human desires then everybody Is a math person Your basic human desires reveal your mathematical nature And you only need to awaken it And as teachers we have the power to awaken these desires and students To help them see the world differently and help them read themselves differently Because that's really what true love is isn't it? True love is to love another human being to see the mathematical potential in them To see everybody as worthy of the beauty and the joy that come from understanding To see each one is worthy of that You have the power to envision a future for students that they may not be able to see themselves Who will you love? Who will you read differently? Thank you very much