In the twenty-fourth episode of the second season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Satyan L. Devadoss, the Fletcher Jones Professor of Applied Mathematics and Professor of Engineering at the University of San Diego. Devadoss opens by exploring how mathematicians quite often find themselves encountering that which is mysterious. Acknowledging that mystery, persisting through it, and, at times, identifying results that may explain it yield intrinsic joy for mathematicians. Devadoss discusses that while he experienced that sense of joy in high school and college, he lost contact with it for the first few years of graduate school. Eventually, he found that playfulness—playfulness that offered little to no immediate use was one way to reconnect with that joy. Devadoss claims that eventually scholars in other disciplines may identify a use for what mathematicians offer but that process, while still with no guarantee, may take decades or even centuries. Devadoss’s own book-length projects concerning discrete and computational geometry as well as unsolved mathematical problems were designed as sites where that joy may be found. Devadoss then closes by discussing the rapid acquisition of power mathematicians are presently experiencing and how the greatest expression of their vocation during this season may be to “bend the knee” and share that power with scholars working in other fields—fields, according to Devadoss, that often demand persistence through far more complexity than mathematicians face.
