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In the twenty-eighth episode of the second season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Francis Su, the Benediktsson-Karwa Professor of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College. Su opens by discussing what motivates mathematicians and how the strange, uncanny, wonderful, and unexpected encounters are often the ones that excite them the most. In Su’s opinion, mathematics is defined as a habit of mind that is constantly undergoing formation. When such a process is well-oriented, strange, uncanny, wonderful, and unexpected encounters become sources of joy, inviting new ways to see and experience the world. Su shares that while his own formation as a mathematician eventually took on such an orientation, that process proved challenging, demanding deep reflection upon what he was uniquely called to contribute and the ways mathematics could serve as a means for such contributions. Along those very lines, Su contends that mathematics education often asks too little of students, demanding that they merely perform as human calculators, not as individuals in pursuit of truth to which mathematics is uniquely positioned to contribute. Su closes by sharing how mathematicians and the habits of mind they exhibit can be of greater service to colleagues in other disciplines, how scholars in other disciplines can be of greater service to mathematicians, and how both groups can work together to contribute to the mission of the Church.
- Francis Su, Mathematics for Human Flourishing (Yale University Press, 2021)
- Michael Starbird and Francis Su, Topology through Inquiry (Mathematical Association of America Press, 2019)
Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.
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Our guest is Francis Su, the Benediktsson-Karwa Professor of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College. Thank you for joining us.
Francis Su: It’s nice to be here.
Todd Ream: As with other guests who contributed to this series concerning mathematics as a vocation, I want to open our conversation by asking about a 1960 article by Eugene Wigner. For individuals unfamiliar with him, he served most of his career on the faculty at Princeton University, served briefly as the Director of Research and Development of what became the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963. In February 1960, he published “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” in a periodical known as Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics.
When reading this article, I found Wigner resorting to curious and inviting forms of language. For example, in his first of two points, he claims that the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious, and there’s no rational explanation for it. In his second of two points, he then contends it’s just this uncanny usefulness of mathematics and mathematical concepts that raises the question of our physical theories.
To begin, how prone are mathematicians in your estimation, and perhaps also physicists, to using terms such as mysterious or uncanny as summations for their efforts?
Francis Su: Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, I think mathematicians in general are often motivated by notions of beauty, notions of things that are surprising or striking and it wouldn’t be that unusual for someone to say that something is uncanny because you know, like other pursuits, people study mathematics because they’re looking for things that are, you know, weird and wonderful, right?
That’s the reason we like to explore things. It’s what motivates, you know, deep sea ocean divers to keep diving because they see strange, uncanny, wonderful, unexpected things. And so mathematicians do resort to language like that because it expresses what they’re excited to study.
Todd Ream: Despite his command for mathematics and physics, in what ways, if any, do you think he resorts to making such observations due to his inability also to draw from other disciplines or other ways of knowing?
Francis Su: That’s a good question. I mean, I don’t know that much about Wigner personally. I do know that he was raised in a Jewish family. And so he probably has some connection to religious practice, and so it doesn’t surprise me that he’s asking some of these bigger questions.
And that, that article, the bigger article is actually a very well known article in mathematics and in the sciences because it asked such a profound question, which is, why is math so good at explaining the world? If you think a little bit about it, you know, if you think about math as something that you might, it’s a construct of the human mind a priori it doesn’t seem like it necessarily has to be so good at explaining the world. In his article, he actually asked this question as well, like, why is it that you would even expect the world to be explainable? I mean, to the extent that it seems to be, it is certainly the natural laws of physics.
The laws of physics are actually things that you would expect only because of our experience do we expect that they’re necessarily governed by mathematical equations, but it didn’t have to be that way, because you know, you can imagine a world in which you repeat an experiment and it doesn’t come out the same way that it did before because somehow, the rules governing the world are changing moment by moment. And, you know, what he reflects on in this article is that so much about the laws of physics, physics are the fact that they are unchanging means that you can actually, you know, put a lens on them and study them.
Todd Ream: Thank you. In what ways then, and perhaps echoing back to, you know, your comment in relation to my first question here, is mathematics as an expression of the academic vocation defined by persistence in the pursuit of truth through that which may otherwise be mysterious or uncanny? And at least for a season, offers no rational explanation.
Francis Su: I’m going to answer the question I think you’re asking, which is, are mathematicians motivated by a similar desire as other scholarly pursuits? And I think the answer is yes. You know, we’re motivated by a desire to seek underlying truths or principles for explaining logical relations, relationships some of which describe the world we live in. That underlying desire is to try to get at what’s true. It’s why mathematicians are good at developing ways, you know, means of explaining their reasoning through logical deduction.
That’s why we prove theorems because we have a way of thinking about these truths, that is, you know, once you write down a proof, it should be ideally convincing to anybody right across space and time, even centuries. So and so that’s, you know, there’s something appealing about that.
It’s like, you feel like once you prove a theorem that’s true, you know, unlike other scientific disciplines you know, that knowledge doesn’t get revised. It might get added to, it might get modified in a sense of like, you know, the kinds of things we might be interested in might change. And so maybe a theorem you prove is not as interesting or becomes more interesting later, but its truth is never questioned, right?
And that’s very different than in the sciences where the things that you understand and know or empirically study might be subject to revision as you learn more and more. And so there’s something very appealing about that I think drives mathematicians to do what we do.
Todd Ream: And to find that certainty when the journey may begin with uncertainty, but the promise of the possibility of certainty may be out there if all goes well in the pursuit, you know, unfolds as one would hope.
Francis Su: Yeah, and of course, you know, just, just because I know some listeners are going to be thinking about probabilities. And, you know, there are some things you can say that you’re not necessarily certain about, but you can talk about and you can quantify the probabilities involved. And certainly that, you know, that’s the basis of much of how we understand quantum mechanics is governed by probabilities. But those probabilities follow mathematical laws.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to transition now to asking you about your own story with mathematics. You earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin, and then a doctorate in mathematics from Harvard University. At what point did you sense that mathematics would prove central to your calling to the academic vocation?
Francis Su: That’s an interesting question because I mean, I was fortunate to have parents who nurtured my interest in sciences and interest in mathematics from a young age. And so I think I was one of these kids that thought, oh, I’ll probably end up doing, you know, becoming a professional mathematician someday, being a scholar.
But it really wasn’t until I got to graduate school that I began to question some of these things because so much of graduate school is so focused, I think, on very narrow questions. I mean, that’s part of part of what you, it makes sense because you’re trying to study, you know, something, improve a new theorem or develop some new results. These, you know, you have to be focused.
But I think I, at the time felt like there should be something more, right? Like I was yearning for a life that was maybe a little more balanced in terms of what it could offer, wasn’t sure about my calling in mathematics and started to question, you know, being surrounded by all these super smart people started to question my identity and why I was actually studying mathematics.
You know, was it because I wanted to be seen as smart or accomplished? Or was it because of a pure love for the subject? And, you know, I had both. I think I started with the pure love of the subject as a little kid, and later on, my identity started becoming conflated with the pursuit of achievement and accomplishment. And so I wrestled with that in grad school, and eventually, had to learn to die to that, I think unhealthy desire for accomplishment.
Todd Ream: Were there any individuals, in particular, perhaps mentors who were helpful guides as you went through that process of discernment?
Francis Su: I certainly had a community around me that helped me process those things from friends who were in other academic disciplines but helped me see that my dignity and my worth doesn’t come from whether I’m successful or not successful. And that, I think, helped me push through some of the hardest points of graduate school and just ultimately decide to stay in.
I mean, there was a point at which I thought, I think I’m going to quit. You know, like, I’m no longer enjoying what I’m doing. I had some bad experiences with various professors that made me think, you know, this is just not worth it.
And some of my friends, I think, in my community helped me see that, you know, maybe I didn’t need this PhD to give me dignity. And ironically, once I realized that it became easier for me to actually enjoy the pursuit of math, the study of math for its own sake.
Todd Ream: Thank you. If I may, you serve on the faculty at Harvey Mudd College, Harvey Mudd College, being part of the larger Claremont group of colleges there in Southern California and Harvey Mudd being known for excellence and undergraduate education in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, et cetera.
Can you tell me a little bit about the culture you found at Harvey Mudd and ways that maybe it provided some balance being focused on undergraduate education, but still those expectations there are quite high?
Francis Su: Yeah, it’s certainly true. Harvey Mudd is a very selective institution. One of the things that I loved about it and was attracted to when I got the job here is Harvey Mudd’s mission is not just, you know, training up scientists and engineers, but as the mission talks about its training up scientists, engineers and engineers and mathematicians who are well versed in the humanities and in the arts so that they may take leadership in their fields and understand their input to their work on society, right.
So there’s this societal focus. There’s this larger perspective around what mathematics and sciences should, should be. And I resonated with that. So that’s very much in the ethos at my school and among the faculty and students.
You know, as you rightly point out, people who come to teach at an undergraduate institution are often focused on providing high quality education and thinking about not just being good scholars, but good teachers.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Broadly speaking that area that you fortunately found a love for in graduate school for you, but also for the rest of us who’ve benefited from your work, is combinatorial mathematics. For individuals unfamiliar with that, can you explain a little bit about how it’s defined? In what ways does it have boundaries in relation to other sub-disciplines within mathematics that give it shape and meaning?
Francis Su: Yeah, so you can think of combinatorics as the study of clever ways of counting things. You know, it’s a subject that you might first, well, certainly you first begin to encounter it in grade school because you learn to count. But you know, in the higher levels in college, you begin to think cleverly about how you might count in very sophisticated ways.
And the kind of mathematics I do these days is that I am interested in combinatorial geometry. And so a lot of the questions that I pursue are related to counting geometric things in some sense. And so that’s not actually what I did my PhD in. My PhD was in probability theory. But, you know, as a scholar, interests change, they move and do different things. And so that’s what I’m studying these days.
Many of the questions that I’m interested in are motivated by the social sciences. And so questions of fairness, questions of justice and how you might accomplish these things through mathematical procedures. Those are questions that economists think about. And so I collaborate with economists in studying those questions.
Todd Ream: Yeah, I was about to say, it sounds very similar to the way some economists approach their work in recent years too. Can you describe for us one of your recent research efforts? And if students were involved in that, undergraduate students there at Harvey Mudd, what role did they played, if any?
Francis Su: Yeah, so for many years I’ve been focused on a combinatorial result that’s connected to another field of mathematics known as topology. And so I studied this thing called Sperner’s lemma, which is actually equivalent, logically equivalent, to something known as a Browwer’s fixed-point theorem.
So the Browwer’s fixed-point theorem is this theorem in topology which says if I have a glass of water, which I happen to have here, I wasn’t planning on this, and I slosh it around, if I took a picture of it before I sloshed it and I took a picture of it after I sloshed it, that you can’t help but have in both pictures, one point that’s in the same position in both those pictures. So it’s called a fixed-point theorem. It’s an amazing theorem because it’s not clear why it should be true. It’s surprising. It’s unexpected, right? Why is there a fixed point? But it turns out to be connected to many major ideas.
So in, for instance, in game theory, there’s this thing called the Nash equilibrium theorem. You can prove that using the fixed-point theorem and so the thing I study is a combinatorial equivalent that, that if you know, want, if you want to think about it involves dividing this thing up into lots of pieces that are in triangular shapes or in tetrahedral shapes and some statement about counting the number of Tetrahedra with certain properties, turns out to be surprisingly related to this very continuous result about fixed points and sloshing, you know, sloshing a glass of water, right? And so that unexpected connection is part of the attraction of this subject. I’ve done a number of projects with students that are related to this topic.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate it. Fascinating.
In addition to your efforts in relation to combinatorial mathematics and topology, you served as the president of the Mathematical Association of America from 2015 to 2017. In what ways, if any, did your service to the MAA impact your view of mathematics education being offered to undergraduate students?
Francis Su: Yeah, it certainly gave me a larger perspective of what was going on in college mathematics education across the country because I, talked to lots of people in that role, visited lots of institutions, and so I got a a much bigger and broader picture of the state of mathematics education and some of its connections to school mathematics.
This is an organization that has mostly college faculty, but it interfaces in many ways with what’s going on in high schools as they send their students off to college. It definitely shaped how I think about the broader purposes of mathematics for everybody, not just a select group of students.
Todd Ream: And might have played a role, I suspect, in your most recent book that we’ll talk about here in a few minutes.
It certainly did.
What is your assessment then of the present role mathematics plays in the core curriculum or general education, depending on the institution that’s being offered to undergraduate students?
Francis Su: Well, I mean, so when you, when one thinks about this question, you, you can’t help but start at the experiences that students have coming into college, right? So many people come to college with this idea that math is a tool. That’s true. It can be applied in many areas, but they don’t necessarily see that math can be beautiful. They often have this mistaken notion that they’re either a math person or not a math person because they’ve often seen math as one dimensional.
And in school mathematics often, kids get the message that if you’re not quick at math, you must be bad at math. And you know, the funny thing is when you get to college level mathematics, it’s not about speed at all, right? That’s not even something that one thinks of as connected with mathematical abilities.
And so part of what I see as my role in college is to help give students a bigger picture of mathematics as multi-dimensional. You know, there are many ways in which you can be mathematical and speed isn’t even one of them, right?
Another thing that I see as my role is to help students see that mathematics is actually as much about a set of practices and virtues as it is about particular skills, right? A skill might be something you learn or memorize, you know, knowing your math facts, factoring a quadratic, you know, knowing the quadratic equation. Those are skills.
Virtues are things like being persistent and problem solving, having courage to tackle problems you’ve never seen before and being able to visualize, you know being able to imagine with your mind. You know, these are all character qualities that are built by a great math education. And we often only think of mathematics as the first and not the second. And so part of what I see as my role is helping students see math in a bigger way.
And when they do that, when they see that it is multidimensional, like I could be pretty good at visualization, and maybe not so good at algebraic manipulation, then they begin to see that there isn’t this one dimensional way of talking about math ability. You move away from this idea that you’re either a math person or not. You can always grow in some areas and you may already be naturally gifted at other areas.
I think the more students get exposure to that kind of idea, the freer they’re going to feel in mathematics. And I think college education is in general moving in those directions. And I’m certainly trying to encourage that..
Todd Ream: Thank you. I can imagine that a young person, who has a certain set of a certain aptitude, a certain way of thinking that might be developed at a level that his or her peers haven’t achieved at least yet, that that young person could be looking at a particular mathematical problem and see things in it, see more deeply in it than maybe their peers would, and thus it takes more time to work through it than say, if we were—I remember being drilled often in terms of by speed with my times tables. We’re talking about a different complexity of problems here, of course, but that’s where speed actually can cause problems potentially for someone who’s truly gifted or at least gifted beyond their peers at a time.
Francis Su: Yeah, I mean, I think you know, there’s a reason why, why kids are often encouraged to be speeding calculations. It comes from a generally good desire that you don’t want kids to have to stumble over basic arithmetic manipulations when they’re doing higher level things, right? Like there’s a good motivation for trying to encourage kids to be automatic with their math facts, right?
But the problem is that that message comes across too strongly. And kids think they have to be human calculators in order to be good at math. And, you know, in this day and age, that’s becoming less and less important to be, you know, we don’t need better human calculators. We have calculators, right? We have computations. We have AI. And so some of the higher order things that mathematics builds in us, those are actually things that are going to be more important, right?
Like day to day, if I make a small algebraic error, that’s not my life as a mathematician to worry about such things, right? My life as a mathematician is actually solving big, hard, complex problems and leaving a lot of the computational issues to computation. So, you know, we have to rethink what it is we’re doing with mathematics and what it’s for. In this day and age, I like to say we don’t need better human calculators. We have calculators.
Todd Ream: I want to ask you about your book published in 2019 by the American Mathematical Society, along with Michael Starbird, Topology through Inquiry. In what ways, if any, did teaching impact your ability to write that book or drive your inspiration for writing that book?
Francis Su: Yeah, that’s a, that’s a textbook for an advanced level course in topology that is written with a former professor of mine. So I mean, it’s a book that basically takes a discovery approach to mathematics. So students are encouraged to discover a lot of the truths for themselves.
And so, you know, the whole book came out of my experience trying to teach the course that my undergraduate topology professor, you know, the experience that he provided in that class. And so that whole book is shaped around this discovery approach, which is becoming more and more popular in mathematical circles known as inquiry-based learning.
And so that’s part of this progression that I see college level mathematics moving into more active forms of mathematical learning rather than the ones where you sit, you watch somebody, you know, talk at you for a while and then you go home and work problems, right? The discovery approach is having lots of in class moments of exploratory thinking.
Todd Ream: Exploratory thinking, looking, you know, something akin to a portion at least of the problem is there, asking students to then grapple with what might be the options or pathways forward in terms of coming to terms with a solution?
Francis Su: Having moments where the thinking is active thinking is being done by students in the classroom, right. It’s, you know, maybe an analogy would be if you’re teaching literature you could either have somebody lecture for 50 minutes or you could actually have an active discussion where students have to process what they’re, you know, what they are. The latter would be active and the former would be passive.
Todd Ream: And that shift to being drawing out what students may otherwise know, but yet not at that moment have recognized or fully able to share and communicate, until somebody helps them give a given an opportunity for expression.
Francis Su: Yeah. And have moments of inspiration and joy in the class. You know, that’s part of what makes mathematics so engaging. And the more students can have those experiences together communally I think the better their experience in mathematics is gonna be.
Todd Ream: The book I echoed earlier was published in 2020 then by Yale University Press, you’re the author of the award winning Mathematics for Human Flourishing. You’ve echoed it to some extent here already, but if you would elaborate on what led you to write that book?
Francis Su: That’s a book for the general public and it tries to lay out a case, a positive vision of mathematics beyond mathematics is just being good for college or career, right? This is part of the message that high school students often get is that you need math because you’re gonna, you’re gonna, you’re gonna need to know this stuff later, which honestly may not even be true unless you’re going on in the sciences, you might not need a lot of the math you learn in high school later, right?
So the book is trying to answer this question. What is, what should mathematics be about? What should it be for? And the title, of course, gives away my thesis, which is that mathematics should be about human flourishing.
And having people who find mathematics, that math can meet certain basic human desires, right? We all have a desire for beauty. We have a desire for truth. We have a desire for freedom. We have a desire for community, right? All these things can be part of mathematical experiences. And that’s part of what I try to show in the book through a series of stories.
You know, there’s not a lot of technical math in it, but there’s an invitation to think about some of these deeper, these deeper questions. And so, you know, I tell a story of my own journey in mathematics, my own journey of discouragement, even if somebody you might, somebody on the outside might look at and say, oh, he’s an accomplished mathematical scholar. And yet somehow I had discouraging experiences in math. Why do we do that to people?
I tell a story of Simone Weil, who is a well known French religious mystic but maybe less well known is that she wrestled with her own identity in mathematics because she had a famous mathematician brother and what did, what did she, how did she learn and change as a result of her struggle in mathematics, which actually then became, I think, central to many of her writings in theology and philosophy.
And then I tell a story of a friend of mine, an incarcerated man named Christopher Jackson, who discovered a love for math in prison. And here’s someone that you, you know, when you look at the outward signs of it, you might like, you might question, like, honestly, like somebody convicted of being involved in a series of armed robberies when he was a teen.
And is it really possible for somebody to learn mathematics and love mathematics who’s in that situation? And so I try to overturn many people’s preconceived notions of who is a math person and who’s not through telling some of these stories.
And that’s part of the motivation for the book. It was born out of my own experiences and seeing many other people’s experiences around mathematics and in trying to enlarge the public’s vision of what math is.
Todd Ream: Thank you. And perhaps, you know, this is part of the answer to this question, but, you know, what you were just saying, but why do you believe the positive reception of that book and the reception it received was so pronounced both within and beyond mathematics?
Francis Su: Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, the book came out as you’re alluding to a speech that I gave at a math conference. And, you know, and afterwards there were a lot of people who were in tears from hearing some of those stories and experiences because I think it resonated with their own experiences, right?
I mean, you have a conference of professional mathematicians, many of who have had similar experiences of discouragement. And or they see this in their kids. They want the best for their, their, their kids. And they are teaching students who have been seriously wounded in their own mathematical experiences, right? And so how do you help change the narrative around mathematics?
They resonate with, with many of the things that drew them to mathematics, they don’t see happening in the math classroom. If math is really about communal experiences of problem solving, how come we don’t teach that way? Right? And if math is really about an exploration of beauty and pursuit of truth of a certain kinds, that doesn’t necessarily come across in the way that math is taught, especially at the K through 12 level, right.
And so, how do we begin to change that? So I think that particular audience of mathematicians, I think, resonated because it aligned with their own experiences. And so part of the, you know, the challenge of writing the book was trying to address the public and help people rethink what math is.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Books I highly recommend to people, more so perhaps even beyond mathematics than within, but both. Thank you. Wonderful contribution.
You talked about the formation of virtue, and I want to sort of build toward that here as our time begins to become short and make sure we spend time exploring what you meant by that. But as a mathematician and a scholar, what qualities or characteristics define your understanding broadly of the academic vocation? What is it that gives it shape and focus for you?
Francis Su: You mean in relation to virtue or?
Todd Ream: Yes, or perhaps the virtue, what the virtues, you know, then cultivate, but you know, how do you sort of give sort of what characteristics or qualities sort of define how you approach your calling as a mathematician? What are some of the central characteristics and commitments that you seek to uphold?
Francis Su: Yeah, I mean, personally, I think one of the things that I think is important is having a certain intellectual humility about being able to say what I know and what I don’t know. And some of that, of course, comes out in the ways that we think about teaching mathematics as well, right? The way I think about it and helping my students have a certain honesty around what they’re able to say from the data and what they’re not able to say, for instance.
I think another thing that is important and valuable is learning how to struggle with our problems is something that, you know, I’ve learned through my own experiences that, that of doing mathematics that it’s one of the things that, that students take out of a mathematical experience, in learning to be comfortable in struggling with a hard problem and hopefully eventually solving it.
But that doesn’t always happen. And we face many hard problems in our lives that may not have easy answers, right? But part of the journey of struggling through, I mean, here’s what I’m going through right now, I mean, I only live only a few miles from the burn zone in a major fire in L.A., right. And there are hard, there are hard problems and questions that in my community is wrestling with, you know, soot and ash that’s toxic. Homes that won’t be rebuilt for a long time displacement, right? These are, these are big, hard questions, no easy answers.
And so part of what I think a math education can help build is being comfortable in that, and yet still trying to push through, like, still trying to be able to say, what do I know? What don’t I know? Right? Is the ash toxic at my home or is it not? How can I find out? What’s the, you know, the resourcefulness that I’m going to need in order to try to answer some of these hard questions is something that is built by a great education, even a mathematical education.
Todd Ream: What I hear you saying then is mathematics is useful and beneficial to not only say calculating certain things that might need to be grappled with in such moments as what your community is experiencing, but also in terms of the ability to persist just as people, that that is also implicitly then, you know, one of the things that mathematicians can share, shape us to be able to come to terms with and become.
Francis Su: Yeah. And more and more it should be explicit, right? It should be like as mathematical teachers or as mathematically informed parents, we should be helping our kids see that math is actually more about these, these big virtues, these, I like to call them virtues, but character qualities that are built through engagement with, interesting but hard problems.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Against what vices do you believe it’s important for mathematicians perhaps to also be vigilant so that those virtues can take hold and grow?
Francis Su: I think it’s true of any human being, but maybe people who are more technically inclined might, it might be easy to be overconfident of what you are able to say. Like I don’t think mathematics is the answer to every, every problem even though I’m a mathematician.
I don’t think that math is an ultimate thing. It’s a good thing, right? It’s certainly wonderful to behold. It’s a wonderful tool that can be used to try to help address hard questions, but the big questions of life, I think, are often not mathematical. And how I engage in the world is not mathematical.
And so I think mathematicians might need to be a little more aware that, you know, their craft isn’t the answer to everything, and I don’t, by and large, most of the people I interact with as mathematicians understand that and realize that. But there could be that tendency to maybe be a little too evangelistic about mathematics if you want to use that word.
Todd Ream: As disciplinary lines, you know, at certain levels begin to blur and the benefits from certain disciplines become obvious to those in other related areas, in what ways can mathematicians become more aware of the contributions that they can make to other disciplines and in turn, individuals and other disciplines benefit from and become more receptive to what mathematicians can offer, that we can partner together in our pursuit of truth?
Francis Su: Yeah that’s a good question and a hard question. I think mathematicians in general, including myself, need to be more broadly literate. I certainly, for instance, you know, my mathematical training didn’t encourage that, right. And so a lot of my own growth in interdisciplinarity and awareness of other scholarly work has only come since I’ve been an active working mathematician who’s interested in big questions. I think we can do more to help mathematicians be broader than they typically are.
At the same time, you know, I see from outside the math, mathematics world, outside the mathematics world that, you know, I often see other scholars being dismissive of mathematical knowledge or maybe being intimidated to engage. And I think that’s maybe not so helpful either, right? There are some ways that mathematicians could be helpful in whatever pursuits you have, whatever scholarly pursuits you have.
Todd Ream: I’ve often thought if we scratch the surface of that dismissiveness a little bit, we will likely find odds on chances that we’ll find some insecurity, and that it is that that’s really what’s driving it versus coming to each other across disciplinary lines with open hands about what we can learn from each other, how we can work together. At one level, model this for our students in terms of how they will go forward in the world, but also with the confidence that higher pursuits of truth can come when we work together than if we simply work in our own silos.
Francis Su: Yeah. I mean, in some sense, we’re all ambassadors for mathematics. The mathematicians are, but also people who don’t see themselves as mathematical people are ambassadors for what math is to themselves and their students. And so, you know, part of the challenge is seeing that mathematics is something that has something to offer everybody.
Todd Ream: For our last question then today for our conversation, I want to ask you about what contributions are mathematicians perhaps uniquely positioned to make to the Church? And in what ways can the Church become more receptive of those contributions?
Francis Su: I think mathematicians have a deep appreciation and understanding of big ideas, big questions, you know, being able to think deeply and carefully around mathematical, I mean, around spiritual truths. That’s a mathematical, those are, those are cultivated by, mathematics, which is helping, helps people think in reason carefully.
I mean, there’s a reason that logic is not, is, you know, something that is taught in philosophy departments, right? It’s because it’s the deep attention to being able to, to, to think and reason, you know, that’s, you know, being a person of faith, I see that as, as something that’s, that’s divinely given because we’re made in God’s image, right? And so we should all be able to appreciate, learning to love God and love others, with all our, not just all our hearts, but all our minds.
And so that’s, I think that’s something that mathematicians can help the Church think through and be and be aware of. A mathematician, you know, when we talk about God’s infinite nature, I think a mathematician has a pretty deep understanding of what infinite means, and it’s a lot richer and deeper than one might think. Right? And so I guess that’s some one way that mathematicians can help the Church.
Todd Ream: Thank you very much. Our guest has been Francis Su, the Benediktsson-Karwa Professor of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
Francis Su: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.
