Johns Mathematical Autobiography

I can remember my first calculator. It was a calculator watch, and I

thought I was the coolest person in the world for owning it. I
remember discovering that 07734 turned upside down spelled out
hello on its primitive LCD display. I also remember what I did to
earn this watch in 3rd gradeI completed a whole book of
multiplication and division problems my parents got me.
Much of my childhood memories of math revolve around either the
idea of climbing a ladder to get to the next thing in math, or
competing with other students to be the fastest/best student in the subject. I can remember feeling
that I was really good at math because I could finish my elementary school math tests faster than
most of my classmates. In middle school, I started attending math competitions, and there, our
teams success hinged on our ability to solve problems faster than our competition.
In high school, almost Algebra II and Trig to me felt like a race to figure what the next button on
my calculator did. I can always remember myself wanting to get on to the next thing. Thats why
when as a junior, I had the chance to take both calculus and trigonometry at the same time, I
jumped at it, and signed up for two math courses.
But even as a high school student obsessed with grades, getting ahead and viewing math only as
a tool, there were small hints that I saw math as something more. When I wrote my college
application, I had just discovered the equation editor on my computer, and so I wrote up an
equation for John Burk that spanned the entire page, and I came up with with what I thought
were some pretty beautiful mathematical insights, like the idea
that the integral (a particular type of sum) of experience is
wisdom. I still think thats a profound insight for my 18 year old
self, and wish I had kept that essay.
Through most of college, I think my interest in math took a
backseat to my interest in science and physics in particular. I
enjoyed math, but I never really took the time to peer beneath
its surface and really see its beautyit was always just a tool to
solve a the next problem. Even using really powerful
computational packages like Mathematica to plot the orbital of
the hydrogen atom wasnt enough to get to really dig into the
beauty of math.
I developed a far greater appreciation for the beauty of math
when I began to teach. I saw it first through physics, when I
could help students to get past simply plugging numbers into

equations, and instead use the powerful of algebra to represent

quantities as variables, and then see all sorts of incredible
relationshipsdid you know that the relationship between the
period pendulum and its length is a square root? This means that
if you want to double the period of a pendulum, you cant just
double the length, you must make it four times bigger. This is
why you arent likely to find pendulums with periods much
longer than 10 seconds almost anywhere. This pendulum at right
is 20 m tall and has a period of 9s.
It took two St. Andrews students to show me the real beauty of math. Pierce Lopez and Geng
Wangwe were discussing a very simple problem. Imagine four towns, arranged on a square.
What is the minimum length of road you need to connect all of these towns? At first, you might
think that you simply connect the towns by drawing 2 diagonal lines between the towns. But if
you measure it, youll see the solid lines in the figure are a bit shorter. It turns out you can figure
the minimum length of the road, and Pierce did this 7 years ago, by writing a computer program
to try measure lots of different pats until it found the shortest one. But it also turns out that bees
have sort of known this all along, and their honeycombs are constructed to minimize the amount
of wax, which takes the place of roads in this problem. Amazingly, soap bubbles also seek out
these minimum surfaces, so if you put four screws through two plates of plexiglass, and dip them
in soapy water, youll get the solution to this problem. And thats just what Geng and Pierce
showed the entire school during one school meeting 7 years ago. (if you want to know more
about this problem, check out this great YouTube video with more info: http://bit.ly/4towns).

If theres a moment when I saw what math can beI think this was it. In this moment, I wasnt
really a teacher. I was someone who had stumbled upon a cool problem, and we worked together
to figure it out, not for some trophy, or even to learn about a new function on our calculator, but
instead just to pull on the multiple threads of an interesting idea to find the deep beauty
underneath. I learned to savor problems, rather than rush past them.
Since then, Ive found joy in math my high school self never dreamed of. Almost always that joy
comes from working with others, now most often other teachers from around the world. The joy
comes in the questions we ask, the small breakthroughs that we make and the connections we
find. It rarely comes from the answers alone, and it never comes from being first or reaching the
next run on the ladder of math (there is no ladder).