Of Nights and Numbers: The Numeracy Diaries , Volume I

Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.

Sarah Williams

There’s people out there turning [numbers] into gold.

John Stewart

I am taking my mathematical education into my own hands, and I am doing it in the company of moonlight.

But first, a story, the story of a hungry, owl-eyed student who wanted to know everything there was to know about language origins, kabuki theater, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Prolog, the Arab Spring, tsunamis, viruses, and metaphors. The Autodidact, as she came to be known, was prone to failures the way some people are prone to kidney stones. Gnarled, prickly failures that emerged from every flap of her heart. Gravity did not become her. Russian Cyrillic bamboozled her. She consistently struggled in her classes, from PE to computer programming to pottery. Pottery, for God’s sake.

After failing calculus twice, the Autodidact found herself in a world of static. Buildings appeared gray. Faces became blobs, doughy flesh bubbling over bone in a cascade of bewilderment. Who was who? The Autodidact was severed from her own mind — a seemingly tragic fate, one that cannot be overcome, for someone who wanted to study the mind.

What remains intact when the brain goes for a walk on the dark side of the moon? Longing, for the Autodidact. She read papers by Goodman and Ullman and Tenenbaum and Steels. Watching their talks on YouTube from the comfort of her sofa, with her cats arraying themselves around her, she said, “I want that. I want to do this kind of work.” Even as she released these butterfly-delicate words into the air, she was reminded that there were people out there turning numbers into gold.

Perhaps she just found her inner world more habitable than the outer one.

But now, the story of a freckled, bespeckled survivor, one who spends her evenings with the moon brushing above her streaking the murky sky in bone light, and a single textbook: Basic Math. The survivor armed herself with a highlighter, a pencil, a beautiful journal dedicated to the cause of mathematics, and a mug of tea, and sat in the wobbling glow of the moon, ready to review multiplication and division and geometry and hope. She lovingly runs her finger over the tabs that she purchased just for the occasion of teaching herself mathematics, from the basics to the stars: Linear algebra. Vector and tensor analysis. Monte Carlo methods. When the calculus failures collapsed from the sky, the survivor first felt sorrow in her ash-covered clothes, then realized that she had survived her failures.

I have survived my failures. I shifted the rubble just enough to crawl my way back into the moon’s good graces.

To talk now of nights and numbers, I am beginning my autodidact studies with basic number theory and a review of geometry. My shelves are pregnant with tomes of calculus and discrete mathematics, and I cannot wait to curl my fingers around those equations. There is a curious default within me, which is that I have always tended to understand math better when no one teaches me, but rather when I sit with it myself and read it over slowly. This is probably not a strength – one must learn to play well with numbers and others – but it is where I draw my line for myself, where I will cease to be a victim of the night and her math, where I will apply my wounded intellect to something greater than myself.

Albuquerque nights are the deepest in the world, and cognitive science is a broad beast spreading its jaunty corpse over the western horizon. I think about it in the shower, what it means to be a cognitive agent. I think about it while I make my toast. What does it mean to be a storytelling organism? Can we make a storytelling machine? I think about it when I brush my teeth, when I make my tea, feed my cats, light my incense. When you sleep, you sleep, but when you’re awake, you do cognitive science.

These are the Numeracy Diaries.