The best math class I ever took was the very last math class I ever took: Statistics. That was 1987. I remember remarking that if math had been this interesting in High School, I might actually have enjoyed it. And who KNOWS what would have happened to me if I had enjoyed math. But math was horrendously boring in my high school and I couldn’t see the magic in it, despite teachers who tried to speak of it romantically. In practice, they crammed formulas down our throats and lost us with ugly overhead projections and grease pens.
By college, I had sworn that I would be done with math as soon as humanly possible and Statistics was my random sampled swan song of choice. From there on out, I would concentrate on only things that had pictures. But in that class, I discovered something interesting – math can tell a story. The single moment that opened my mind (I can remember the classroom, I can even remember what seat I was in ) was the day the professor explained the fallacy of the phrase “3 out of 5 dentists recommend.” “Which 5 dentists?” He asked. It was like the sound of one hand clapping. The class, for me, became a study in skepticism. Numbers never lie, but numbers can be used by liars, to tell lies. To this day, anyone who tells me something is a “fact” is immediately suspect. If you listen to Steven Pinker speak (from my earlier post), you see that he hardly ever uses “facts” and yet he is so clearly knowledgeable. Reason, I have found, is much better than math, in almost every instance.
Over the last few years, though, there has been a merging of math and reason, and it has happened through a technique known as “data visualization.” A quick sequence of events has lead us to a very interesting place in history, where we can now “see” math. The metaphorical operating system (desktop, folders, etc.) introduced us to this notion that code could be translated into something more humanly accessible. Then an important thing happened: the evolution of interface design merged with the evolution of the database. This was most prevalent in Website design, where engineers and designers worked side-by-side with each other, merging their talents to create online business solutions for people. One of the major discoveries during this time was the activity of “tagging,” which, in essence, was people filling up databases themselves. Imagine one guy at Flickr putting tags on photos as opposed the current practice of people putting tags on the photos themselves. Same with Facebook. Information started streaming in. Now, all of the sudden, we have a generation of people who are adept and trained to fill out database questions: from logins and passwords to cities and friends’ names to preferences and personal information. And we are starting to discover exactly how interesting math can actually be.
It used to be that visualizing data was was Excel did – you fill in the database and then it spits out a pie chart. Now, though, people are finding newer and more exciting ways of showing data visualized. Perhaps you’ve seen The Visual Thesaurus. Or tag clouds a sites like TwitScoop. Check out this site that maps Renaissance artists and writers on a timeline, as well as an overlay on Google Maps. During all the talk about “earmarks” in the debates, I used this website to get a better idea of what’s really going on, all done through data visualization. Or this guy, who has decided to log just about every activity in his life and rather than create a new kind of visualization mechanism, has just cleaned up the old one in kind of a fascinating way. And we’re using it in marketing all the time, from Sprint’s “Now Network” Website, to our own “Health Footprint Calculator” for Anthem. And this site gives a whole overview of different data visualization techniques. A macro of the macro.
If I were teaching a math class in High School today, I would be teaching kids with these tools. Sure, the building blocks of basic arithmetic is necessary, but geometry, algebra, trigonometry and calculus are probably not the right set of tools for today’s little minds. Many of those math languages are as dead as Latin in terms of their importance in the actual application of math in most of the world. The excuse that schools use is that the process of learning formulas, equations and proofs creates great minds – I challenge that notion. The best applications of math are happening in the fieds of data strategy and programming. Let’s flip the math on math and assume that the greatest impetus for a great mind is excitement. I don’t have stats to prove that, but it sure stands to reason.
