#come at me physicists and applied mathematicians I have the power of god and abstract algebra on my side

[mathematicianadda]

(META) Concrete thinkers, incapable of metaphor, are gate-keeping mathematics and eroding its most powerful property: abstraction.

Earlier today, I posted about the fascinating similarity between fractals and logarithmic functions. Though it stated in the first line that it resided in the conceptual realm, a boo-boo w/ a metaphor I used got the post flamed by a literalist. I deleted it out of cowardice. I shouldn't have. Whoops. I'm not wrong to connect the two concepts. When I get better in these fields' Algebras*, more will be written on this. But it indicated a larger problem...

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In Lex Fridman's podcast w/ Grant Sanderson, creator of 3Blue1Brown on YouTube (link below), he discussed 3 types of mathematicians: the puzzle-solvers, the physicists (broadly speaking here...), and those who "love abstraction and the power of generality." Certainly, this list is incomplete, but in a way that proves my point here. Throughout history, the mathematical greats who invented our studies in school, the Newtons and Eulers, were *wizards* of abstraction. Evidenced not only by their discoveries - take calculus, for example; the study of the behavior of infinitesimals - but by their prolific generations in disparate domains like Great Literature. Chock-full of metaphor and analogy, these thinkers thought deeply and solved even bigger problems. Through generality, they invented the frameworks our bachelor and grad degrees. They are our revered ancestors.

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In the early 20th century, Abstractionists like Turing, Goedel, and the analytical demigod John von Neumann, trail blazed computational science. They needed insanely computationally complicated equations solved, so dammit, they put theirs minds to work. Using what they had already grasped, broke new ground via abstraction. We're indebted to the pioneer-class. They used their heads, drawing on intuition, the pattern-recognition software innate to homo sapiens.

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Since the mid-1970s, it seems, (though cannot be verified via a gate-keeping function known as "peer review", check out Game Theory on Wikipedia for more information) that our technological prowess, the empirical furnace that has been alight since the dawn of the 17th century, has been burnt down to embers. Occasionally, we see a noteworthy digital innovation from the Valley. But outside of the strictly IT universe, astonishingly little. We go to college, then grad school, then some PhD program to learn complicated theories about complicated things so that we can handle minutia. Everything seems disparate because each course takes the top-down approach. We start at such a high level that half the class gets 65% on the first exam and drops out. The tech- or research-bound students are starving for some application, but the semester ends before that section of the textbook is covered. It almost seems malicious. The pattern-recognition software I referred to works from the ground up. It's quite clear for those familiar with psych and neuroscience. So if we are always fed the abstraction, our grass-roots, evolved, intuitive brains have nowhere to go with it. We can't perform the abstraction on our own, as they we're not allowed to have access to that part of the toolkit. We go into the workforce with a litany of equations our brains have vaguely mapped to {insert technical field here.} Then we wind up in sales jobs to pay the bills. In Business Schools (where I come from), it's even worse. They don't even apply calculus (dare I mention stochastic calculus or Brownian motion...spooky!) in economics class until grad school because they think our tiny Microsoft Excel brains would explode. For a concrete example here, it took me three years after college to the connect the dots on 'derivative', the tool of calculus, and 'derivative' the financial security class most known for its hand in 2008.

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In any domain, when things begin to fall into place, divergent from complexity and into alignment, we find emergent simplicity. Our ancestors called it discovery, "innovation" better fits millennial vernacular. When things continue become increasingly muddled and complex, it's called stagnation. Stagnation in the Information Age no less. As a 24-year old debating a future in an expensive and unproductive graduate program or my soul's slow death in Big Corporate, I truly hope momentum will change on this one. Lets's ask more questions, make more mistakes, make more irresponsibly logical leaps (when the downside to said leap is low), do less incremental improvement, and math the s*** out of our future. Instead of worrying about today's hyped problem like the Middle East, climate change, {pick your favorite}, perhaps we could...maybe...just maybe...solve them? Let's use this beautiful, logical, intensely rigorous toolkit we've been gifted by our ancients, MATH, to solve the problems of the future.

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PS - Please tear apart my ideas if you'd like. But, if you flame me ad-hominem style, you're just proving my point on this...gate-keeping ruins math.

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* Algebra is a anglo-bastardization (hope this isn't a swearword that get's me deleted) of 'al-jabr,' meaning 'bone-setting,' literally referring to how we move the 'bones' around on paper. Thank god the Arab world kept the mathematical lamp burning throughout the European Dark Ages. Why don't the literalists explain the meaning of this word...ever? Not even in high school? Because they take things for granted and don't read.

**I didn't make the mistake of apologizing for my learning issues in this post, unlike its predecessor. If you're still reading this, you're not the type to idiotically flame something thought out Reddit-style. Many mathematical greats have had issues in the over-structured, 100 equations in 30 minutes-classroom setting. Two examples are Albert Einstein and John Nash. The former worked in a patent-office because 1900s Barvaria didn't like that he was scatter-brained (or that he was Jewish; over-structured societies are more prone to racism, also known as tribal affinity); the latter, lived his 30s thru 70s deluded by the menacing condition of Paranoid Schizophrenia. The chiding he received in elementary, secondary, and university-level academia played a significant role in his social disconnect. See Isaacson's Einstein and Nassar's A Beautiful Mind to learn more. I'm not suggesting that I possess a mind bearing an ounce of resemblance with these legends, or any others. What I am suggesting, however, is that there are at least a few greats among us who are being crowded out of our institutions, and given an "ADHD"/"Dyslexic"/"Aspergers" diagnoses for their trouble. Why do we continue to call bright kids with learning superpowers 'learning disabled'?

*** Check out Lex Fridman's phenomenal podcast. Here's the link to the episode w/ Grant Sanderson, creator of 3Blue1Brown; one of the few who understand the power of intuition in mathematics.

https://lexfridman.com/grant-sanderson/

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