Aiming for the Moon
Aiming for the Moon
118. Utility > Beauty - The Lost Wonder of Mathematics: Dr. Satyan Devadoss (Mathematician and Author of “Mage Merlin’s Unsolved Math Mysteries”)
University of San Diego Fletcher Jones professor of applied mathematics, Dr. Satyan Devadoss, questions whether mathematics should be learned merely for the sake of utility and efficiency. Throughout high school, we are taught mathematics because it is useful in STEM fields. It is for the sake of new technologies that you learn about percentages, Pythagoras, and polynomials. But perhaps, by turning math into merely a science, we have missed its poetry. As Dr. Devadoss discusses in his book, Mage Merlin’s Unsolved Math Mysteries, the beauty of mathematics is not its technological use, but its ability to expand our imaginations and discover the world beyond the limits of the material.
Topics:
- Modern Math Education - Skill over Discovery
- The Loss of Wonder in Modern Math Education
- Joy in Solving Unsolved Math Problems
- Rediscovering the Beauty of Mathematics
- How STEM studies Became Separated from the Humanities and why it matters
- Exploring Education and Interconnectiveness
- Complexity and Value of Different Disciplines
- The Value of Analog vs Digital - "Learning to be Human again"
- "What books have had an impact on you?"
- "What advice do you have for teenagers?"
Bio:
Dr. Satyan Devadoss is the Fletcher Jones professor of applied mathematics at the University of San Diego. Before this, he was professor at Williams for nearly 15 years, and has held visiting positions at Ohio State, Harvey Mudd, UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, and Stanford. He is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society, and recipient of two national teaching awards, with his thoughts appearing in venues such as NPR, the Times of London, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. His most recent book is Mage Merlin’s Unsolved Math Mysteries (MIT/Penguin), and his other adventures can be explored here: https://satyandevadoss.org/
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University of San Diego Fletcher Jones Professor of Applied Mathematics, dr Satyan Davidas questions whether mathematics should be learned merely for the sake of utility and efficiency. This is the Aiming for the Moon podcast and I'm your host, Taylor Bledsoe. On this podcast, I interview interesting people from a teenage perspective. Throughout high school, we are taught mathematics because it is useful in STEM fields. It is for the sake of new technologies that you learn about percentages, pythagoras and polynomials. But perhaps by turning math into merely a science, we have missed its poetry. Like Dr Davidas discusses in his book Mage Merlin's Unsolved Math Mysteries, the beauty of mathematics is not its technological use but its ability to expand our imaginations and discover the world beyond the limits of the material. If you like what you hear today, please rate the podcast and subscribe. You can follow us at Aiming4Moon on all the socials to stay up to date on podcast news and episodes. Check out the episode notes for Dr David Doss's full bio and links to our website aimingforthemooncom and our podcast sub stack.
Taylor Bledsoe:Lessons from Interesting People. All right with that? Sit back, relax and listen in. Thanks again to Paxton Page for this incredible music. We're finally live Awesome. Well, thank you so much, dr David Haas. Did I say that correctly on air.
Taylor Bledsoe:That's perfect, taylor Well thank you so much, dr David Haas. Did I say that correctly on air? That's perfect, taylor, great for coming on the podcast. I'm very excited to discuss with you all the fascinating array of topics you've been covering. So I want to start off. You're a mathematician and of course, the number one thing that teenagers always say about math is oh, it's boring. Like when am I ever going to use this? And I'm sure I might take a little bit of flack for saying you're right, you had on a mathematician Like isn't that the teenager's worst nightmare? So I know you have a different approach to math education. Can you kind of talk about that with me?
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:Yeah, that's a very you know, that question that you just asked and the way people feel has nothing to do with being a teenager. It's totally true for being a teenager, but it's also true when you're 30 and 40 and 60. When I'm flying on the plane and somebody next to me is a 65-year-old man and I tell them I'm a mathematician, they say the exact same words oh, dear Lord, you know, there's all of this like stress and unresolved conflict about, like completing the square or the Pythagorean, it's like you know the quadratic formula. It's all coming back to them again and and my answer and this is this is just my personal spin on it, taylor, and this is how we look about mathematics is I don't actually find joy in how useful it is To me, math is completely about playing.
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:I just love to play. And so if you think about, if you think about what Elon Musk is saying right now, right, if you think about what Elon Musk is saying right now, right, if you think about what the big tech companies are saying right now, they're saying the following thing to you, to your generation, they're saying you know what, if you learn math, you can build a rocket that'll take you to Mars. If you learn math, you could figure out how to cure COVID and possibly cancer. You know what the students would get interested in if they hear the words math and Mars. Nobody cares about math. Think about Mars, think about COVID, think about rockets, and so that's not what.
Taylor Bledsoe:I love.
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:I don't love COVID or curing cancer or rockets. I just want to play with mathematics. So how do you get somebody excited about math is not to tell them how useful it is to balance a checkbook, it's just to talk about how great math is by itself. And the way I want to frame it is, you know, if you've ever gone hiking on like cool trails, say in a national park, and there are all these like predetermined trails, that somebody says, hey, if you take this, you'll get to the top of this beautiful view. That sounds cool for a while. But you know, what I love to do is, in general, is to go off-roading Like can I find my own trail? What if I'm going to find a lake nobody's seen before or take a view of it that nobody's seen before?
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:To me, the notion of math is you just have a handful of things you can fool around with and then just ask crazy questions. Unlike science, which is bound by the laws of physics, this is the way the protein is going to fold. This is the way gravity works. This is the way the enzymes are going to react. Math has no rules. We just play by anything we want. If we don't get it in this dimension, we go to 18 dimensions or we go to 300 dimensions. The moment somebody asks me hey, why is a 300-dimensional idea useful? My answer is it isn't. You just get to play, it's awesome.
Taylor Bledsoe:So I'm curious, because I'm sure a lot of the modern world now is the way we see usefulness, and the way we see goodness about a topic is how useful it is. So how does math apply to Mars? How does math apply to COVID, as you were saying? How does math apply to balancing your checkbook? And what do you say against people who are like, well, if it's not, it's. If you're saying that it's not, you don't do it for the usefulness, then how is it not a waste of time, for example? How do you answer that argument?
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:Yeah, that's a great question and the response is simply do you enjoy great food? Do you enjoy great friends? Do you go to a movie? Do you love listening to music? And, if you think about those things, do you like the way that perfume was when you walked in the door?
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:None of those things are useful. You can talk about the fact that you know what all I need to do to live is I need some carbohydrates, I need some proteins, I need a little bit of fat. Why don't you just, like you know, give me a needle and shoot me up with that stuff, or take a pill, and that'll give me enough energy to make it through the day. Or would you rather have, like an amazing tiramisu, you know, or just you know, this fantastic cup of coffee and you, right before you, have the best slice of pizza you've ever had. And then you go see that movie. You go to a concert and you check out Beyonce. And I say you know, taylor, what's the point of checking out a Beyonce concert? I mean, like, has that made you a better person? Like, has that made you smarter? No, it's made you a better human. Like that's what we do, right?
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:Humans care about the things that are not efficient. We care about things that really make us human, like what it means to laugh, what what it means to laugh, what it means to make friends, what it means to like just play and create and find joy in those things. To me, the notion of efficiency gets you into a big trouble about optimization. Hey, you're not a human anymore because this robot can do your work. You know you don't love me the way I need to be loved in this particular way because this other thing can optimize my love in a better way. That's not what it means to be who we are. What we really resonate with are the silly things in life, the goofy things in life, the things that we find frivolous, but that's kind of what gives us identity.
Taylor Bledsoe:That's really interesting. So the next question that would come to my mind if I were a high school student. Well, I am a high school student taking algebra two at the moment, and it's okay. So if we're learning math with the beauty of math, what about me, who might not always find some of the topics that beautiful? They, you know like, have 60 math problems about completing the square. They really don't feel pretty at the moment. It just feels pretty awful and monotonous. So what would you say to that person if they tried to argue that? Well, math just doesn't, the beauty doesn't resonate with me.
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:Yeah, I mean in full honesty, most of algebra. My worst, I think the worst created topic in the history of humanity is pre-calc, like, oh, dear Lord, it is. It's talking about the guts of a lawnmower and talking about carburetor design. And the students, including me, are just what is the point of this thing? Why am I doing this thing? And I fully agree with you. I am on your side when you ask those questions what's the point of completing a square? Okay, great, maybe there's a point somehow. Maybe it helps me to go to Mars. But, dear Lord, is this supposed to be fun? I don't find completing the square beautiful. Personally, let me tell you what I find that's amazing in math and this is true, what I find amazing in anything. It is to try to figure out something nobody's figured out before. So to me, when I talk about the beauty of mathematics, taylor, the way a high school framework or even an elementary school framework or college framework should be done is to talk about problems that nobody's ever solved before. Like I want my students to be thinking about things nobody has ever done before. If you think about Beyonce, the reason it's an amazing work of art and so many of the things she's done is because she's at the cutting edge of knowledge and the cutting edge of her art and craft, right. How do you take ideas of race, injustice, feminism, beauty, fashion and make one song out of it that is powerful, in like a four and a half minute track? And she can do it. She is a queen, right, and so she is kind of pushing the boundaries of so many things, and what completing the square is is not pushing any boundaries. People have done it before. There's a computer that can do it. Why are you spending 50 problems doing this thing?
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:To me, that's not the joy of math. The joy of math is to think about problems that nobody solved before, and it turns out most of mathematics is filled with unsolved problems. 2% have been solved, 98%. Nobody has a clue what to do, and if you keep looking at the 2%, it's kind of boring, right, because somebody has done it before. It's like wanting for you to make a new Beyonce album when she's already made it. It's like, why do you want to redo that again? Why can't you do something new using her idea, using Taylor Swift's idea, maybe a little John Coltrane, maybe do something completely different? What would that look like? Oh my gosh. There's a rush that you get by thinking about that. That's the kind of rush I want to give my students when they think about math Unsolved puzzles.
Taylor Bledsoe:It sounds so unattainable, like that joy of now there's sometimes in math. I have a particularly great teacher at the moment and she's like you discover kind of the math and how it kind of all interlocks and interrelates to each other. It's so beautiful and fascinating about that. But how do you kind of instill that joy about not being able to solve a math problem, for example, because that's always the worst possible feeling for me and so many other students, like, oh my gosh, I cannot figure out what is going on here. I must have failed, it's all over, my grade's done, I'm failing the ACT, the SAT out the window. How do you instill the joy of not exactly knowing and then working through that?
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:Yeah, what a wonderful question.
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:To me, the joy of working on unsolved problems is that when you say, oh my gosh, when I do this thing and I don't get it and I feel awful, right, I feel like I suck, I want to support you and agree with you and say, taylor, you do suck. That's exactly correct, girl. You can't get it. But the great thing about an unsolved problem is nobody has gotten it. That means you are now standing toe to toe with the greatest mathematicians who have ever lived and you are equal to them. Like they suck and you suck Like you're bad at math and you know what. So are they. And let me give you one simple example. It's one of my favorite questions. If you have a two by two grid, you know, like tiles on a, on a bathroom floor and a kitchen floor, like you know, you have a four, you know you have four tiles that are one by one, that cover a two by two hole, right, and you could, like they match up perfectly. Like you know, a one tile here and a one tile here and a one, so it forms a perfect square, cut into like a grid. Right Now, what if I just make the hole a little bit bigger, just like a touch higher and a touch wider. So instead of a two by two, two by two, I have like 2.00001 by 2.00001. It's just like a little bit higher. If I put those four one by one squares, you know you can't cover it right Because it's going to have that little crack at the top and the sides. So here's my question to you like how many squares do you need to cover it? And you can take these squares and move it around and overlap them and do whatever you want to. And it turns out if you have seven squares you can do it, and if you have five squares you can't do it. And you can just sit there and kind of think about this for a little bit. There are pictures that you can find on the web that do all this. But can you do it with six squares? Can six one by one squares be overlapped enough to cover a little two by two hole? It's a little bit bigger. And the question, taylor, is unsolved.
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:Nobody in the and to me this is what drives and motivates those questions. Because of this you might get excited and go wait a minute. Are you kidding me? You're telling me that the greatest minds who've ever lived don't know what to do with squares on a hole on the floor. This is dumb man. Mathematicians must be stupid, and the answer is they are. They really don't know almost anything compared to the simple things about what squares are, and so this might make you interested in the Pythagorean theorem. It might make you interested in geometry a little bit. It might make you interested in how to rotate squares and angles a little bit.
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:You're motivating and driven to learn about how to play the guitar because you've seen an amazing guitarist playing a concert. You see the edge of glory and you go oh my gosh, I want that. That's what drives you to learn. If somebody says, pick up the guitar and learn it, and you've never heard a cool album before and you've never seen guitar played in a rock concert before, then it feels like, oh my gosh, I have to do scales again. This is the worst thing ever. So what I'm encouraging is for students and teachers to take kids to a concert like take them to an unsolved puzzle, take them to the edge of what mathematics is and let them get excited by it. And then they go oh my gosh. This is why I'm doing geometry Now I get it.
Taylor Bledsoe:So it's like exposing them to the beauty of some of the unsolved aspects of that.
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:Exactly.
Taylor Bledsoe:So of course, part of that is you have to get the basics. In order to play the guitars, you were saying, you have to know the scales. So at what point do you switch from you know learning arithmetic, multiplication, your multiplication facts and some of the rudimentary stuff, and it just kind of seems to take repetition into some of the solving problems, like how do you know when you have enough of a base in order to approach these big problems.
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:So cool, it turns out you almost need to know nothing to know unsolved math problems. So I wrote a whole book on figuring and just taking any student in the universe and making them walk to the edge of knowledge and look over and go are you kidding me? Nobody knows how to solve this thing. There are problems that all it requires is addition and division by two, and that is enough of a problem to even for somebody to say this question is so hard, it doesn't even belong in this century and it's just a silly thing that you might have learned in like third grade and that's enough to think about these unsolved problems. Then you're asking a very different question, Taylor. What you're asking is one is what do I need to know about the problems? It turns out you need to know nothing. Really Anybody can like learn about these problems and it's gorgeous.
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:But the second question is how do I solve the problems Like, what weapons do I need? The problem is nobody solved them yet. So you might be taking a shower one day right after a run and go wait a minute oh my gosh, I think I got and you might just be able to solve it, or you might need the most sophisticated mathematics that's ever been made and you need to develop new ideas to even crack that code. Nobody's ever solved them yet, so I can't even answer for you the kind of classes you need. If I tell you, oh, you got to take calculus and you got to take trig and you got to take algebra too, then that means I must know something about how to solve the problem. I don't. Everything in your book that you've ever had are people who already know how to solve the problem, and they're basically testing you on how much you know. What I'm trying to figure out is how do you do something nobody's done before?
Taylor Bledsoe:One of the things that I find fascinating is we talked about this a little bit off air is how great innovators combine math skills with art and humanity, and not in the way that we see where they're depicting mathematic or scientific things in a more artistic way or something like that, but they combine their. They it's almost like you have two silos and then they interconnect them. So you have Steve Jobs is really into calligraphy and dance, and then he he took that design in his technical knowledge and created the Apple computer and with the beauty and the design and the simplicity of it he combined those two aspects. Then you have Leonardo da Vinci and all of his numerous examples. So what happened to separate these two groups of people? So can you kind of talk about why do we think scientists are the really rational ones and then the artists are, you know kind of? They are more into humans and humanity and feelings. Just it doesn't have to apply as much to the practicalness of society.
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:Yeah, and that's a beautiful layered question. Let me get to kind of the first part for now, which is, you know, the notion of college to me is one of the weirdest experiences you'll ever have. It's four years of being in a box where you can play with anything. In high school you already, by the state that you live in, have a rudimentary set of rules as to you got to take Algebra II and you got to do this. And to graduate you have to take at least two science classes and one this class. Every state has their own laws about what you have to do and you can maybe pick one or two electives, but, taylor, when you get to college you have this box and you could play at that time.
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:And my encouragement to you and to any student who's in high school, kind of moving on to college life, is don't choose your major too early. Don't think, oh my gosh, I always wanted to be a doctor. You know I want to be, I want to study mechanical engineering or I think I love history. It turns out that I really believe, as a teacher has been teaching for about 25 years, that about 2% of the students really know what they want to do. You know the weird ones, right, like? They're the ones whose parents are like, yeah, she's going to do mechanical engineering, no matter what, and that's fine. But 98% of us, including me, is we just liked things in high school because we had a great teacher, like somebody who was a great music teacher, and they like, oh my gosh, I want to play the piano. For that reason, right, 100%. This person rocked in history and that's why I want to do history.
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:Don't go to college thinking you know what you want to do. If you want to have the cool flow of somebody like Steve Jobs, as you're saying, who can bring calligraphy design into computer science, learn the whole field, pick some major. Nobody really cares. I've done data analysis with this stuff. It turns out your major doesn't even matter. Companies don't even care what you study. They just want to know that you love something, that you're passionate about something, and so just pick a major, doesn't even matter.
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:But then learn about history. Learn about ethnography, like, learn about musicology, learn about anything. Get your hands on art history, learn about sociology, the way people think, the way cultures move, and over the years, after you graduate, after you've flown around, those little pieces of nuggets will start changing and being connected in your mind. If you want a quick turnaround like, oh, I want to learn this and I want to start using it the next day, that's not going to happen. Steve Jobs did not do this overnight, right? He created this company and these ideas over a long time with other great designers. So that's my encouragement to you about mixing those disciplines.
Taylor Bledsoe:Do you think that we should redesign some of the elementary and then middle and high school, some of those early learning stages, in order to foster more of this interconnectiveness and playfulness? Instead of having you know, you have everything's very segmented. Is there a way we should change it? Or do you think it's okay and then in college you kind of experiment?
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:no-transcript, like when you're in third grade and fourth grade or even in kindergarten you might have done heard like Montessori education where kids play with blocks, right, and you're trying to do multiplication and addition and you do kind of moving blocks around or moving cubes around or dodecahedron, those things, and then somehow it kind of becomes not cool to do that when you're in junior high, like, oh, you're playing with blocks still Dude, you're in elementary school, right, and it certainly is not cool to do that in high school and college. In math, certainly If you go to college, or if you think about going back to what you just said about completing the square in algebra two, do you have like play things to do that? It's usually just thinking in your mind, thinking a piece of paper, thinking of chalkboard or whiteboard. What I want to do is ask this question when you're a kid, you have arms and legs, right, you have a head, you have your whole body. And as you get older, if your arms and legs start falling off and body, and as you get older, if your arms and legs start falling off and as you get to high school, like you now have nothing, and as you get to college, you're just like a floating mind and as you go to grad school you don't even have a head, it's just total digital data. Then I could totally get behind the way we're doing things, that as a kid you have physical things and as you get older you become more mental.
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:But you know, you and I all, thankfully, have our limbs. Like most of us have our entire bodies. So why don't we use our entire bodies to learn? We have been using our bodies to learn in elementary school. Why don't we do that in junior high school? Why don't we have a math class filled with craft supplies In college? Why don't you learn calculus and calc, three and quadratic forms and differential equations and all of these beautiful things that are out there using our bodies? Why can't we touch mathematics? That, to me, is my drive. That's what I'm trying to figure out.
Taylor Bledsoe:That's really interesting. It reminds me I know we talked about this author of Plato's Republic and he talks about how geometry is one of the most beautiful parts of the universe and how it's the purest, and his argument is he was really into the realm of forms, in which I'm not going to explain all of that right now, just Google it, guys. I'm going to butcher the definition, but one of the reasons he loved it so much is because it was the purest well, from what I understand of it, it was the purest representation of the physical world. So he was into more of this realm of forms which was then reflected in the physical world, and the physical wasn't as good as this pure, almost intellectual side, and it almost seems like that's what we do from elementary school. Okay, so you're in the physical kind of rudimentary part.
Taylor Bledsoe:And then you go to high school and you're you're enlightened because you don't play with blocks anymore and you're in the realm of forms. Now you don't have to interact with the world. So what do you think about that? How like.
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:Yeah, I mean that actually connects, taylor, to the question you asked earlier about when did the disciplines that were all mixed together? Remember? We're talking about all the silos that have come up nowadays, and actually that's the word that you just said about enlightened, and so there's this notion of the Renaissance era where all of it was mixed. Like da Vinci would be drawing a picture but then looking at the way the body works as a biologist, and then like building something as an engineer, and for him, art, bioengineering, all of those disciplines were the same, right, he would just switch hats and he would just be this one person doing it. And the Enlightenment era came and it separated us into pieces here's the historian, here's into pieces, here's the historian, here's the mathematician and here's the artist. And it actually did something that was a little unfair. It actually started, over time, valuing science over the humanities, over the arts. You kind of echoed it a little bit when you said, oh, science is doing the rational stuff. I think you said this earlier, right, and then art is kind of like doing emotional stuff. That's not true. If you work with real artists, there are incredible notions of thought and brilliance and complexity. If you're an artist or art historian or an architect, and as a historian, even today, the notions of history is a big deal. Did something happen? Even talking about the election, right, like if that happened? Or did this event happen even three to five years ago? The notion of what it means it's not that they're dealing with more emotional stuff.
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:The way I frame it is they're dealing with more complex questions. So to a scientist, you're asking questions that are kind of easy. Now you might think whoa, whoa, are you talking about COVID and cancer and all of these things being easy questions? And my answer is yeah. You know why they're easy questions is because you can kind of measure them right. You can do repeatable experiments. You can check it out and see what the enzyme does to the body and try it again, and try it on the mouse and then try it on the rat and try it on. You know, eventually get approval to try it on humans to see if you can do it. But they're repeatable. But history is not repeatable, so you can't play that game in history because it's a much harder question.
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:Things have gotten complicated and a musician and an artist is trying to deal with how to express things like a poet, without even words. So now you're dealing with something that you can't even measure right like you can. You can't even use English, for you can only use images to try to get across, whereas math it's just on the other end of the spectrum. We are so measurable, we have so many lingos, like integral and derivative and all the things you've learned in algebra. Parentheses and squares and plus and minus and square, like those are all symbols, right, but they're so clear that if I write square root of three and you write square root of three, you know exactly what that means.
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:But if I say the word secular, oh my gosh, you must be a secular girl. Well, you're like. Well, what does that mean? You know like, what are you trying to say with it? Because that word is so loaded and complex. That's what a poet deals with and an artist goes dude. I wish I was lucky enough to use the word secular. I don't even know how to say that the right way. And so you're right. We're partitioned in different ways, but we have to be careful, because everybody's dealing with rational, thoughtful, brilliant ideas, but they're dealing with different kinds of questions of different complexities.
Taylor Bledsoe:That's really interesting, I wonder because we've studied this a little bit in school how Kant and the others basically said the only world that really exists is what you can measure and what you can touch with your hands. So you only have your own experience. You don't have universals and global values. So it's interesting because it seems to be what you're proposing is. Well, at the moment, we value science and math as the highest possible pursuit and the most complex and hardest one, because we can grasp it and because we can understand it. Like that. And no, you're flipping it on your head and saying well, these things that we don't really understand, that are subjective, that's actually makes them more difficult and even sometimes even more influential in some ways because we can't judge them.
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think the reason science has become more and more powerful over the years is because of ROI. The return of investment is much quicker in the sciences and in math and STEM disciplines. Right, because if you say, build a bridge, okay, you might need to come up with new plastics and new chemicals and new ideas, but you know what, within five years or 10 years, I can knock it out. And then you say, hey, could you take care of discrimination? You know what? Five years and 10 years isn't working.
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:We've been talking about race issues before the founding of this country and we haven't. And we're slowly chipping away at it and we're putting we have. Isn't it true, taylor, that we put men on the moon? And my question is which is harder, rocket science or race? And to me, it's clear that we've done the rocket science stuff and we could do it again, and we've gotten to Mars and put a rover there. That's because it's easy. Rocket science is the easy stuff. The really hard stuff is what it means to love somebody, what it means to forgive somebody, what it means to talk about what equality is Like. Is gender equality important? Well, how do you solve those big issues. That is what sociologists deal with. That is what philosophers deal with. That's what historians deal with. They're dealing with much harder things than what simple STEMI people like me deal with. I'm the dumbest of the dumb right. I deal with math, square root stuff.
Taylor Bledsoe:That's really interesting. I wonder if so, as we were talking about, we value the issues that we can measure and then, because those are the rational and the real issues, as we were talking about, we value the issues that we can measure, and then, because those are the rational and the real issues as we see them, because we can touch and experiment with them, the physical world and as we all talked about stem, um, it's, it's very fascinating because, and then if you seem to look at some of the statistics, economically, so, if the stem people get paid more than you know, humanities, and is that just because of the ROI?
Taylor Bledsoe:I'm assuming, because you have that return of investment with you know, big data makes more money than big poetry.
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:Yeah, I think so Because we buy things right, like it's, because the turnaround time for you to make an Apple computer or an Apple watch is, you know, the cycle is hey, within a year you're going to get a new MacBook, or you're getting new headphones, or Dell's going to release this new thing, and here's a new camera and this, you know, this is an updated feature that has shake reduction or all these things, and and that technology is this quick return of dispose the computer you have. Get the new computer, because it's the latest and the greatest, to me, the lasting things that are going to affect us. I mean, it sounds like that is. There's a rush when you open a Christmas present or a Hanukkah present or a birthday present and you go, oh my gosh, that's cool, that's what I wanted.
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:But there is something that's so lasting, taylor, that what really would matter are, like that great dinner you had with your grandparents. It's like, you know, when my grandma took me out for that one thing or that, or the family trip we took, or my friends and I we went to watch that movie and it was amazing. Afterwards we spent three hours eating tacos and talking about it, and so those are the things that we wish. We can kind of bottle right Like that's the things that we really long for, and to me that's what the arts and humanities are calling us to, to be human, whereas in the sciences it's beautiful and it does what it's supposed to do. But we put so much weight on the short-term fix that doesn't satisfy our cravings.
Taylor Bledsoe:And it's really interesting. So nowadays we apply these things, we try to cross the stem and understand the humanities, and then the feelings, and then some of these issues that are, as I guess in your line of thought, too complex for science and math to tackle, and then I guess maybe not vice versa with humanities, but they just tackle different issues and different types of problems.
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:I think a lot of times, you know, if somebody says, hey, could you tell me? I struggle with things like TED Talks because could you tell me your entire life's work in 20 minutes and I'm going to listen to that at 1.5 speed while I'm going running it's just we're reducing deep complexity into simple things and it doesn't help. And so usually the way if you and I are having a tough time getting along or there's another issue to deal with, I could write you a text or a tweet or an email, but that's going to get us to a certain level. But it really is just sitting down and breaking bread with you and having a meal with you and talking it out with you and spending maybe a month to a year working on a relationship and saying, hey, I'm sorry about that, what were you thinking? And that you know that's the more difficult stuff. That's not what the quick tweet's going to do.
Taylor Bledsoe:Well, I'd love to go into this more, but unfortunately we're running out of time, so I want to end with our last two questions, which are the first one what books have had an impact on you?
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:I would say the book that echoes to me from being in high school all the way to now and my favorite book of all time is Beowulf. To me, instead of giving you like a bunch of different books to read, you know, when I read it in high school I was like, you know, I have to read it, check the box, you know, nerdy AP, something lit or something like that. I forgot what I read it for and Beowulf is actually written in three parts. It's the greatest, I think it's the greatest work of art of all time in terms of a written word, and it's written as this young punk who, like slays you know this creature and rock star right Grendel, this like demon of demons kind of, and then he kind of gets old, he becomes king, he's like middle-aged, you know, 30s to 40s, and then he fights Grendel's mom and at this time he's established. And then the last part is he is now like the old, legendary king and he fights this dragon who comes back.
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:I think this is a book that I encourage, you know, any of your listeners, any high school kids, to read, but then put it away and then read it again like 10 years later. It's not something you have to read every day, but, man, it's so amazing to see it again in fresh eyes. Me, I'm on the dying end of trying to fight my dragon as I fade into the grave. But yeah, that's my recommendation. I love that book.
Taylor Bledsoe:So then our last one is what advice do you have for teenagers?
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:I would say learn to touch with analog things again. Try to put your phone down, which has pieces of glass. Try to get away from Teslas that have glass monitors, computers and iPads that are glass, because you know what Glasses. It actually, to me, is giving the middle finger to your hands, because your hand is not designed for glass, it's curvy, it's designed for knobs and dials to turn and touch. And so learn to play with like analog things again, like lp records, like.
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:Learn to make a cake with a whip, you know, and then you can. And if it's a bad, bad cake, you'll make some enemies, and that's awesome, because life's great to have awesome enemies. And if you make a great cake, you'll make some friends, because that's awesome, life's great to have friends. That's what Beowulf is you find great enemies, great friends. Every superhero I know has an archvillain. If you don't have an archvillain, make a cake. You're going to get one, because your cake might suck and it might be amazing, and then you might have other super friends with you. So that's my recommendation Just be analog.
Taylor Bledsoe:I'm curious do you have analog stuff in your life that could be digital?
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:Yeah, in fact, when I came to San Diego, I was in the East Coast for a long time as a professor. When I came to San Diego, I said I'd love to have a laboratory, a mathematical laboratory where we can touch things, where it has no digital things, just chalkboards and popsicle sticks and toothpicks. I'd like to have some money, to have a salary and in my office I want to make sure I have my own chalkboard also because I'm a big fan of just like touching things with chalk. It might make that weird squeaky noise, but if you use the right chalk Hagoromo chalk from Japan it's amazing. If you use the right chalk, it is like melting butter on a skillet. It is gorgeous.
Taylor Bledsoe:All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I really enjoyed our discussion. We covered so many coming on the podcast. I really enjoyed our discussion. We covered so many like so many different topics and then how topics intersect with each other. It was fascinating. Thank you so much for coming on.
Dr. Satyan Devadoss:Thanks, so you had some brilliant questions. This is joy to be here.
