Pythagorean Triples? (Solution #1, Part 2)

In Part 1, we have begun discussing primitive Pythagorean triples, and thought a little bit about them. Now, we want to try to characterize all primitive triples. That is now our goal.

Limiting The Possibilities

Suppose we are given a primitive triple (a,b,c). Recall that this means that the three positive whole numbers a, b, and c share no common factor and satisfy the equation a2 + b2 = c2. Our goal now is to think about these conditions, and to learn as much as possible about the three numbers. There are a lot of things that you can try (and very few people if any would come up with what I present here on their first try) but this line of thought is one thing that, with enough time, people thought to try.

For instance, it is an important fact that a perfect square, when divided by 4, has remainder either 0 (if the number is even) or 1 (if the number is odd). The reader can verify this for themselves. Using this information, keeping in mind that a2 + b2 and c2 must have the same remainder when divided by 4, we can discover that c must be odd, and exactly one of a, b is odd. Since a and b are interchangeable, we will suppose that a is odd and b even.

By manipulating the Pythagorean equation, subtracting b2 from both sides and factoring “the difference of squares” c2a2 = (ca)(c+a), we can conclude that b2 = (ca)(c+a). We now do not know about the factors of the two terms in (ca)(c+a), but we will use a trick with fractions to get around this. Dividing both sides by b(ca), we get a new equation

$\dfrac{m}{n} = \dfrac{c+a}{b} = \dfrac{b}{c-a},$

where we choose m/n to be the fraction in lowest terms. If you ‘flip’ the first and third terms in the equality above, you obtain the new equality

$\dfrac{n}{m} = \dfrac{c-a}{b}.$

We can add/subtract these equations together to see that

$\dfrac{m}{n} + \dfrac{n}{m} = \dfrac{c+a}{b} + \dfrac{c-a}{b} = 2\dfrac{c}{b}$

and

$\dfrac{m}{n} - \dfrac{n}{m} = \dfrac{c+a}{b} - \dfrac{c-a}{b} = 2\dfrac{a}{b}.$

Combining the fractions on the left of each equation using the common denominator mn and then dividing both sides by 2 gives us equations

$\dfrac{c}{b} = \dfrac{m^2 + n^2}{2mn}, \ \ \ \dfrac{a}{b} = \dfrac{m^2 - n^2}{2mn}.$

Since a, b, and c have no common factors, the fractions a/b and c/b are already in lowest terms. Because of this, if we can ensure that our new fractions are also in lowest terms, then the tops are equal and the bottoms are equal, and we would then be able to conclude that

$a = m^2 - n^2, \ \ \ b = 2mn, \ \ \ c = m^2 + n^2.$

So, we now have a pathway to part of our answer! All we have to do now is to set up boundaries for the values of m and n within which we know that each of the three values m2n2, 2mn, and m2 + n2 will have no common factors. As it turns out, we can actually force this to happen. To see this, suppose a prime number p happens to be a factor of all three of these expressions, it must be a factor of (m2n2) + (m2 + n2) = 2m2 and of (m2 + n2) – (m2n2) = 2n2, and because of this must also be a factor of both m and n. But, go back a few paragraphs, when we defined m and n. We defined the fraction m/n to be in lowest terms, but we have now claimed that m and n have a common factor. As it turns out, this makes no sense. By assuming we could find a common factor, we contradicted ourselves. This is a mathematical trick called a proof by contradiction (more on this another time), but for now we need only say that this means we can take for granted that our m and n can in fact be chosen in such a way that these three values in fact share no common divisor.

We’ve now done a good deal of exploration, we have actually solved half of the problem! We have established that every primitive triple (a,b,c) can be associated with these three numbers, m2n2, 2mn, and m2 + n2 exactly when they have no common factor. I will leave as a problem for a curious reader the following:

Claim: The numbers m2n2, 2mn, and m2 + n2 have no common factor if, and only if, m and n share no common factor and exactly one of them is even (and the other is odd).

This reduces every primitive triple to an easy-to-produce formula… but we actually aren’t quite done. We can ask now the reverse question of what we just did. Instead of starting with a, b, and c, what if we start with m and n? Does our new formula always work? Or only sometimes? In fact, it will always work. To see this, we want to add together the squares of the two smaller numbers and see if it is equal to the square of the larger number. In order to do this, recall briefly the “foiling” method that gives us the formula (x+y)^2 = x^2 + 2xy + y^2. Using this, we can see that

$(m^2 - n^2)^2 + (2mn)^2 = (m^4 - 2m^2n^2 + n^4) + 4m^2n^2$

$= m^4 + 2m^2n^2 + n^4$

and

$(m^2 + n^2)^2 = m^4 + 2m^2n^2 + n^4.$

So these are the same! The Pythagorean equation is satisfied. Our new construction can now move both ways. We can start with (a,b,c) and find the numbers m and n, or we can start with m and n and find (a,b,c). What this does now is establish the following complete answer to our original question.

Theorem: The three numbers a, b, and c can form a primitive Pythagorean triple if, and only if, these three numbers can be expressed (in some order) by the numbers m2n2, 2mn, and m2 + n2, where the numbers m and n have no common factors, are not both odd numbers, and where m is larger than n.

Our question has been answered, which is quite a wonderful thing, but this approach requires a lot of guesswork and toying around to discover. There is a second, more beautiful and simple solution that gives us the same answer and I think gives a lot more insight about where all of this is coming from. This second solution will come in a post of its own.

Pythagorean Triples? (Solution #1, Part 1)

(If you haven’t read the “Problem” post with the same title, go there first. This will make more sense if you do.)

We want to find all the Pythagorean triples (a,b,c). The first thing a mathematician would probably do is to try some small examples, gather some information, and then look for patterns within that information. For instance, if you only allow a to be a number from 1 to 10 and if you let b be between 1 and 50, here’s all the triples you get:

(3,4,5), (4,3,5), (5,12,13), (6,8,10), (7,24,25), (8,6,10), (8,15,17), (9,12,15), (9,40,41), (10,24,26).

Try to find some patterns in there. Look around for yourself…. the first thing you might notice is that some of them are really repeats – like (3,4,5) and (4,3,5) are really the same thing. So we can whittle down our list some without losing any information – in situations like this mathematicians usually choose the one where the first number is smaller, so I’ll do that, but it doesn’t really matter. Here’s the new list we got:

(3,4,5), (5,12,13), (6,8,10), (7,24,25), (8,15,17), (9,12,15), (9,40,41), (10,24,26).

Then, I look again for a pattern. There definitely looks like a lot of chaos, but there is at least one more thing we can pick out. Notice that some of them are just “multiples” of others. Like (3,4,5) can be made into (6,8,10) but doubling everything, and (9,12,15) is made by tripling everything. In fact, this motivates our first piece of knowledge:

Lemma: If (a,b,c) is a triple, then so is (na,nb,nc) for any positive whole number n.

Proof: We can see by simplifying that

$(na)^2 + (nb)^2 = n^2 a^2 + n^2 b^2 = n^2(a^2+b^2) = n^2 c^2 = (nc)^2.$

So, the necessary equation is true, so (na,nb,nc) is a triple. So, we are done.

(Side note: Mathematicians use the words lemma, proposition, and theorem all to mean “a true statement.” The connotation of “lemma” is that this is a smaller “piece” that helps us get to some bigger, more important thing. A proposition and a theorem are the “bigger things”, and theorems are bigger and more important than propositions. They have nothing to do with “difficulty” per se, just how important they are to the questions we want to answer.)

This is a good step. What this means now is we can reduce our list even more, to the triples where the three numbers don’t have a common factor. These have a special name, called primitive triples. Now, we hit on a big math idea – that of building blocks. With a little bit of effort, the lemma we just found basically tells us that every Pythagorean triple is either primitive or is a multiple of a primitive triple. Therefore, if we can list all the primitive triples, we actually know all the triples. Going back to our list, we reduce down to the primitive triples…

(3,4,5), (5,12,13), (7,24,25), (8,15,17), (9,40,41).

As we have just seen, our original question “what are all the Pythagorean triples?” (which from now on will just be called triples) has been reduced to “what are all the primitive triples?” This turns out to be a question which can be addressed more directly.

To see the next pattern, we will now let a be larger than b again. So, we have a list

(3,4,5), (4,3,5), (5,12,13), (7,24,25), (8,15,17), (9,40,41)…

There is now another, not-so-obvious pattern here. Look at the a’s. We have a pattern 3,4,5,7,8,9,… 10 gets skipped, and if you keep going you see that 14 is also skipped. So 2, 6, 10, and 14 get skipped. That’s a pattern, or at least it looks like one. When you look at these numbers, this might give us an idea: if (a,b,c) is a primitive triple, neither a nor b can be a number like 4n+2. This turns out to be true:

Fact: If (a,b,c) is a primitive triple, then neither a nor b can be written in the form 4n+2 for n a whole number.

Proof: This time, I’m going to intentionally leave a few details out so that anyone who is curious can fill them in.

Now, where can we go from here? We’ve started looking at primitive triples. As a mathematician, this is good progress, but we are not done yet. I encourage the reader to think some about this, and in a second post on this question I will demonstrate a method of finding all of the primitive triples.

Pythagorean Triples? (Problem)

I’ve spent some time thinking about how I want to present things I love on this blog, and one format I’ve come up with is a Problem/Solution series. The idea here is to have two posts with the same name – in one of them, I will explain an interesting problem and try to give some prodding questions about how an interested reader might play around with it. Then, in a second post, I’ll try to show how a mathematician might look at the problem, and then I’ll provide a solution to the problem.

The goal here is twofold. Firstly, I’d like to give people an opportunity to try things for themselves. Think of this like a puzzle – you don’t have to know much math to give things a try. Full answers often take a very long time to find, but even finding part of the answer can be very gratifying. The second reason I like this format is that I can use it to give anyone reading a “look into the mind” of a mathematician. I’ll build things up one step at a time, hopefully shedding light on important ideas along the way and showing how the math really does have a story behind the scenes. I’d strongly encourage playing with problems on your own before reading my answer. You’ll get a lot more out of it that way, even if it’s just for 5 minutes.

Anyways, on to the first problem! For the math people out there, the “name” of the problem I will be laying out is the classification of all Pythagorean triples. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry about it. It will be explained.

In a previous post (So What is a Proof?), I showed why the Pythagorean Theorem is true. So, we now know that now. But we can keep asking questions. For example, we now have an equation about right triangles:

$a^2+b^2 = c^2.$

Now, like with any other equation, it is natural to try to find some solutions. We can choose any values for a and b that we want, and then ask what value c is. Well, we can do a “square root” on both sides of the previous equation, and now we get

$c = \sqrt{a^2+b^2}.$

We might ask what sort of number c is, and we then realize that c is the distance between two points on that triangle, and so we now have learned how to calculate distances! If you are into geometry, you might want to know if there is a version of this for triangles that do not have 90 degree angles (there is, it’s called the Law of Cosines for those who are interested). We might have noticed that we can divide both sides by c squared and rearrange a bit to get a new equation

$\bigg( \dfrac{a}{c} \bigg)^2 + \bigg( \dfrac{b}{c} \bigg)^2 = 1.$

Now this looks like a question about fractions. Well, we never actually said that a and b had to be whole numbers, so maybe it isn’t really a fraction… but what if it were? This is the question that comes most naturally to me, because I am fascinated by whole numbers. Might I be able to find some whole numbers that make this equation work?

This isn’t immediately obvious one way or the other. Equations can be rather unpredictable, especially when you want every number to be a whole number. I’ll give an example to show what I mean. One of the questions related to this which people began talking about a long time ago was “What happens if you change the 2 to something else?” So what about an equation like

$a^3 + b^3 = c^3$

or

$a^{11}+ b^{11} = c^{11}$

or any other value in place of 2… maybe those have some whole-number solutions too? As we will soon see, when we left the exponent as 2, there are plenty of whole-number solutions. What took hundreds upon hundreds of years to discover is that if you change the exponent to 3, or 4, or 5, or any whole number larger than 2, the number of solutions drops to ZERO. (Well, except for if you make a=0 and b=c, say, but that’s pretty boring, and when the exponent is 2 there are some not-so-boring examples.) For those who are interested, this is called Fermat’s Last Theorem, and we have only known this amazing fact since 1996. There are tons of good books and YouTube videos on this topic, I’d highly recommend surfing a few.

The main point of that excursion is just to say that equations don’t always play nice. Weird things happen. Even with the regular equation, most of the time you don’t get whole numbers. But what about this equation? What kinds of answers does it have? Now, I can say why I described the problem the way I did. If we find three positive whole numbers (a,b,c) that make the equation

$a^2+b^2=c^2$

true, we call (a,b,c) a Pythagorean triple (since it’s three numbers that satisfy Pythagoras’ Theorem). Another way we could ask this question might be what are all the right triangles where every side is a whole number of units long?

Try it yourself! If you check out the post with the same title with the word “Problem” with “Solution”, if I’ve posted it yet, you’ll be able to see a complete answer, along with all the steps a mathematician might take to get there.

My Testimony

A lot of what I hope to write on this site will be about mathematics and it’s history, as these topics form my career and are one of the great passions of my life. I also plan to write about other passions that I’ve developed over time, which include mental health and philosophy. Now, I write about the most important aspect of my life – my Christian faith.

Whatever your background, I hope you will hear me out. I know many reading this might know very little about Christianity, many others might have a host of agonizing memories associated with a church or family member who attends church, and many of you may also be Christians. I am trying here to write something that will be accessible and informative to anyone, regardless of background.

I am writing here a story, a story that in my faith tradition is called my testimony. The use of this word derives from how it is used in court – a witness’ testimony in court is their statement of what they saw or experienced that is relevant to the trial. Within Christianity, we often use the word testimony to mean our deepest, most meaningful experiences and stories that involve our faith. Very often, in their testimony a person might talk about how they came to believe in Jesus, how their life changed when they began following Jesus, and perhaps other major life events that were deeply related to their faith.

This, then, is my attempt at writing my testimony. I unfortunately have to skip a lot of details, I wish I could cover more. Maybe at a later time, I will. But I hope that in writing out my life story, I can shed light on what Christianity actually is, and is not, and open up the possibility for honest conversations.

I grew up in a household with two parents, both of whom are devoted Christians, and I grew up going to church. I considered myself a Christian growing up, and I knew the most well-known Bible stories and passages. All the way through high school, this is all Christianity consisted of to me – attending church and youth group and trying to “learn all the right things.” For reasons that I will explain later in my story, I would now say that I was not truly a Christian at this point in my life.

Most of the important developments of my childhood are in some way connected to my very early love for math. I was the kid that did math problems for fun at home and at school, from as early on as second grade. This passion has remained, and only grown over time. So, I was seen by others and myself as “the math kid” ever since I can remember. I have also had ADHD my whole life. I will say far more about this some other time, but in summary, ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) is a medical condition that makes things like maintaining focus, picking up on social cues, and organizing one’s thoughts very difficult. All that needs to be said for now is that the combination of ADHD and being labelled “nerdy” from very early on made it difficult for me to make friends, and affected my self-confidence a lot at a young age and made me extremely shy.

I also had a very hot temper until fifth grade. That year, one incident got particularly bad, and I was overwhelmed by guilt by what I had done throughout my life in moments of anger. The emotional force of that guilt caused me to start repressing almost all of my emotions, whether consciously or subconsciously I’m not exactly sure. In a culture where men are supposed to be “tough” and never express emotion, this trend continued. My peers appeared to only see me as “the human calculator” (I was actually called that as a nickname for many years) and I saw myself that way for a long time. The only thing that was really important about me was my skill in math, not my emotion or anything else about me. This had a lot of negative impacts on how I think about myself, many of which I struggle with to this day.

The path I have taken towards breaking out of this mentality was complicated. The less complex part of this was the realization that a passion for math is emotional, just like any other. The creative genius of mathematician Leonhard Euler (one of the most important mathematicians ever to live) opened my eyes to the creative and emotional sides of math during my junior year of high school, and Euler and his work have stuck with me powerfully to this day.

While becoming acquainted with Euler’s work and life is one of the primary reasons I work in mathematics today (and is the primary reason I have been able to connect my emotional and spiritual life to my mathematical work) this was not the most potent emotional impact on my development. The first of the major moments was a ‘summer camp for nerds’ in my home state called Governor’s School. This was a place where the some of the most passionate math students, science students, history students, dancers, and musicians of my age group live together for more than a month on a small college campus and pursue their interests in an open classroom-like format.

This camp was the first time in my life anyone actually wanted to know why I loved math so much, and I gladly shared and learned from them about what they loved. There I made friends who were the closest I’d ever had. There were people who helped me recognize that I have an emotional life, and that my emotions matter. This was the first time in my life that people outside of my family took that kind of an interest in me, or at least the first time I felt comfortable with myself. I opened up, and began to actually acknowledge and experience my emotions again.

However, something very horrible ended up coming from this opening up. I don’t want to go into detail here. The short version of this is that I was emotionally and verbally abused within the same context in which I was first learning to think about my own emotions. The positive aspects of that situation prevented the abuse from hitting me until a particularly important friendship was severed, but once that friendship was cut off, I felt the depth of the wounds all at once. I feel totally comfortable sharing details of what happened to me, but for a variety of reasons I don’t think it is wise to put all of that here. I actually still very much value and care about the people involved with all of this, and I hold nothing against anybody. (If someone thinks they know what happened or wants to know, I ask that you respect my privacy and talk to me privately if you want to talk). I don’t really need to share details, as it will become clear quickly how badly this hurt me. I began to hold a very deep belief that I was not worth loving or caring about by anyone, for any reason.

The shock that set this in motion happened during my first year studying at Virginia Tech. A year and a half of horrible memories hit me all at once. In my mind, the only friend I’d ever had who truly knew me had rejected our friendship in the strongest of terms. That is an exaggeration of what actually happened, but that is how it felt to me at the time. I quickly fell into a very extreme self-loathing which almost instantly wrecked my mental health.

Within days of this, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder were making it difficult to function (I ought to be clear at this point – I was never formally diagnosed with these disorders, but that is because I didn’t see a therapist until nearly 2 years after the fact, and I’d overcome a lot by then. However, knowing what I know now I am almost certain I would have been diagnosed with both post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression). Getting out of bed was nearly impossible, I had very powerful temptations towards self harm, and I had regular flashbacks daily made me relive the darkest moments of my life. Quite literally, I did not think of myself as fully human, because I thought I was too broken emotionally to be considered human. The sentence “I care about you” sounded to me as nonsensical as “2+2=5”. I never had real suicidal thoughts, but I didn’t really see much reason to keep going either. Speaking about this time of my life can sometimes bring me to tears to this day. Those memories no longer have power of me because of what God has done for me, but the spiritual warfare that goes on behind the scenes with people who have suffered as I have is more than people usually realize.

It was during this trauma that I stopped calling myself a Christian. I didn’t really know what I believed, I flipped between atheism, agnosticism, or deism. It was a confusing and painful time spiritually. Since nobody could ever love me, or so I thought, there could not be a God who loved me. I was too broken. There were too many things wrong with me, I made too many mistakes in life, and I’d been hurt too much. Why would anyone ever love a person like that? Fortunately, these questions have answers, but it would be a year before I began to hear them.

Fast forward to my sophomore year. I joined the Virginia Tech marching band, and made some new friends there. There were plenty of good friends there, about whom I could say much, but for this particular story my friends Emily and Chelsea matter the most. I grew closer to Emily first of these two, as I’d known her as an acquaintance for most of my freshman year. We had very occasional spiritual conversations, and she regularly invited me to InterVarsity, which is an organized Christian community and social group on many college campuses. I had been unable to attend, and wasn’t really sure about going to a Christian event anyways. Nonetheless, I appreciated her invitations and was open to the idea of going.

One day, late in the semester, Emily experienced a breakup that took her by surprise and hit hard. Though she did a decent job keeping her composure in public, I could see in her eyes that day the same pain that had plagued me. I couldn’t bear seeing someone hurt like that, especially someone who had been kind to me. So, for the first time, I talked about what happened to me. Not very much, since I was far too scared of being rejected again to do that, but I wanted my friend to know that she was not alone.

Her immediate response to this was to tell me she knows what depression is like too, and she immediately started trying to comfort me. I was honestly confused by this. She put her own pain to the side, and tried to comfort me. That made no sense. Nobody had ever treated me quite like that before. I didn’t magically feel better, but that friendship became a lot deeper very quickly as she continued checking on me and wanting to know how I was doing and how she might be able to help.

Not too long after this, something similar happened with my friend Chelsea. She had a similar sort of painful experience, I reached out to her and tried to empathize and comfort her. Her response surprised me even more. She responded by telling me that she didn’t know much about depression, but that she wanted to understand and talk about it with me. This was even more confusing. Why would anyone spend time trying to understand why and how I was hurting? What sense does this make? I had no answers, but both of these friends kept checking in on me.

Once band season ended, I became extremely lonely. I knew that both Emily and Chelsea were in InterVarsity, and because of the friendship I’d built with those two, I accepted Emily’s invitation and went to their “large group” gathering. I felt as if the weekly talks given there were written for me by someone who knew my innermost private life and was going out of their way to help me. They kept talking about spending time alone with God, relationship with God, how God loved us and how He empathizes with our suffering. I cried at least once during every weekly meeting that whole semester, and several times at each of the first few meetings. On top of the messages, these people cared for one another in a way that was so different from anything I’d seen before, and I longed to be part of that. I wasn’t really sure what was going on, but there was something about these people I could not ignore.

Around this time, in February of 2017, I went on a weekend retreat with this InterVarsity group. There were many emotional moments in those 48 hours, more than I can really talk about but one is far more important than the others. The retreat had a series of talks about the God and prayer, and during one of those talks to speaker did a guided prayer with us. A time came during the prayer when we were encouraged to be still and listen for God. This is pretty normal Christian lingo and doesn’t normally refer to hearing a literal voice, but that night that’s what happened. It was in one sense like the voice of my internal dialogue, but it was in some way more powerful and louder, I could feel the words hit me through my whole body. And the words I heard were “It’s okay. You can love again.”

Obviously, this took me by surprise. That night, I spent a lot of time reflecting on what to make of this surreal experience. I had believed that I was so broken that I could never be loved, and because of this I didn’t truly let anybody in anymore. This was destroying me internally, and it was also destroying my ability to love others well too. What I came to see that night during my prayer was a radical, new idea to me – that I am both broken and valuable. This is at the core of the Christian faith. Even though we are all broken, imperfect people that do not deserve to be in the presence of a perfect God, He has such immense love for us that He paved a way to redeem the brokenness of the whole world and of our own hearts. And because we are too weak to fix our own brokenness, He became like us, entering the world as a human being in order to bridge the gap. There are whole books written that lay all of this out in detail (I would gladly recommend some to any curious readers!) but what I’ve just described is the way I processed it at the time.

That night, I began to understand how life-changing this message is. It is called “the gospel” for a reason; because “gospel” translates to “good news,” and this is the best news I’d ever heard. But at the same time, the message I grasped that day is so powerful that believing it would be nothing short of life-changing. For me, that meant being who God had made me to be – which in my case I realized included being vulnerable about my suffering. That night, in a room with 3 guys I’d never met, I trusted God for the first time and really began to open up my bloody and bruised heart again. This was the day I became a Christian, a follower of the message of redemption that Jesus brought to the world.

Everything changed after that, at a rapid pace. My friends at InterVarsity, especially the two I’ve already mentioned, took such great care of me. Within a month, their constant love enabled me to understand that I was worthy of love… I will never forget crying nonstop tears of joy for 20 minutes when this hit me. Another month later, something happened that I can only describe as a miracle. I won’t tell the whole story, but the only way I know how to explain this is that God sent a Christian therapist who specialized in helping people like me to InterVarsity on a critical day in my life. She prayed for me, and I instantly felt a wave pulse through my body, and I felt 100 pounds lighter, and the massive weight that had been removed from me was replaced by an indescribable peace and joy. I literally did not want to sleep that night, and I didn’t. Why would I? I could finally see through the clouds, and what I found was a God of infinite love who had gone out of His way to carry me home and patch up my wounded heart. That night, I spent enjoying the immense joy and gratitude that I suddenly found pulsing through me. I have still had struggles, but that soul-crushing weight has never returned.

God gave me an incredible community in which to grow as a Christian in this time. Emily taught me how to have spiritual conversations, Chelsea showed me daily how to be a loving friend, and my mentor Jake worked with me on pursuing openness and embracing my emotional life in a healthy way. The fall of my junior year, I was given the honor of leadership in InterVarsity, and I began a Bible study for the marching band, a community whose schedule often did not allow them to go to other Bible study groups. That same semester, I gave this testimony publicly for the first time, and through that I mentored a younger man with a story similar to mine. I had the blessing to watch him grow, and at the end of my two years as a leader, the roles had reversed and he was leading and teaching all the small group leaders, including myself.

I have had mental health problems again, though not to the degree I did before. I sought counseling to learn how to deal with my flashbacks, and through my group therapy sessions I met one of the closest friends I’ve ever had, who also joined and was deeply impacted by InterVarsity. I have had the blessing of being able to walk with others through their own struggles with anxiety and depression, to speak publicly about my own experiences, and to volunteer with campus counseling centers in spreading awareness of resources and working to debunk stigmas about issues surrounding mental health.

And it is not only the emotional aspects of life that have been revitalized. After following Jesus for about a year, I discovered apologetics. The ministries I found, of which some of my favorites are Reasonable Faith and Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, tackle important intellectual and emotional questions related to faith and life. Through these and other ministries, I have grown and learned much; I have developed an interest in academic philosophy because of these ministries, for instance. Christianity is not just emotional, in fact it is deeply intellectual as well. Apologetics ministries like these have motivated me to think more deeply about all aspects of life, and I have a stronger sense of coherence between my career, my friendships, my faith, and my emotional life as a consequence.

This does not mean life is easy. I fall far short of who I should be on a daily basis, and I still struggle with many wounds that have not fully healed yet. I am still prone to occasional depressed moods, and the memories still haunt me and sometimes bring me to tears. But I know I have God Himself working inside me. He has given me strength to carry on when I feel like everyone has abandoned me, and hope enough to face the pain without fear. I know I am loved, and the whole world is loved. To close, I summarize my experience by repeating the famous words of Psalm 23:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

What Is a Proof?

I’ve talked a fair amount in some of the earlier posts about the idea of a proof. Now that we’ve developed a conceptual underpinning of what that means, we can see one in action. I hope my readers enjoy this as much as I do, as what we will discuss here is among my favorites.

In case you’re worried, I’m not going to start talking about the proofs you may have seen from high school geometry. While these technically count as proofs, they are a far cry from what most proofs today look like. Every proof will justify what it says, but almost never is this done in the painful and boring ‘two column’ setup that I have heard many talk about, or in some kind of highly structured list. Proofs are usually presented in more of a narrative form, actually.

Just because a proof is highly logical does not mean it is not beautiful. Just as in every other form of art, precision does not stand at odds with beauty. Most mathematics today is done with sentences and paragraphs explaining and guiding the reader through the ideas. When this is done well, the person reading not only can understand why each step in the progress is correct, but is able to perceive the overall direction of the proof. As a graduate students, one of the ways I know I understand a proof is if I can give it a “plot summary,” capturing the progression of ideas with minimal reference to details. As you read through and study a proof, things should begin to make more sense as you go, or at least they should come together at the end. The best proofs will have a sort of climax that represent a very powerful or surprising flash of insight, and the experienced reader will immediately notice one of these when it occurs, just as you can tell when a movie is reaching its climax.

Just as someone who reads a lot of literature can perceive different sorts of depth and beauty in writing, so an experienced reader of mathematics sees different kinds of beauty in a proof – the most common words of this sort that I hear are beautiful, elegant, and slick. I haven’t every actually asked other mathematicians about whether they consider these aesthetic terms synonyms or not (I’d love to hear some comments from others on that!) but I personally think these are all subtly different. Maybe one day I’ll be able to put into words what I mean by each of those. But regardless of whether these words actually have different aesthetic meanings, my point is that math is not merely black-and-white. There is rich color to be found, if you know where to look and keep an open mind. There’s a lot of beautiful math out there. One of my primary career aspirations is to make this beauty accessible to everyone I come across.

So, to begin on that mission, I will now try my hand at a presentation of one of the most famous equations of all – the Pythagorean Theorem.

This is a very ancient piece of mathematics, that was proved by a civilization that developed mathematical proof in a way that had lasting impact, ancient Greece. The theorem is named after Pythagoras, who either proved this himself or whose school of pupils brought forth a proof. Today, this is how we normally phrase the theorem:

Pythagorean Theorem: Suppose that the sides of a right-angled triangle have lengths a, b, and c, with c the length of the longest side. Then the following equation is always true:

$a^2 + b^2 = c^2.$

Since the Greeks phrased all of their mathematical work directly in terms of geometry, they would have used the areas of actual squares as the parts of this equation. I don’t want to try to actually use their phrasing, because that might lead to confusion, but the following pictures should give a good illustration.

This is the framework within which a Greek mathematician would have thought about the Pythagorean theorem. It is worth saying that it is far from obvious that this should be true, and I think that ought to make it interesting to us. Why should there be any equation relating these three sides, and why this one in particular? In all areas of life, we get bored by something that is too obvious, but less obvious things catch our attention. It seems to me that non-obviousness is at least part of why we like comedy, magic, and sports – the punchlines we don’t see coming make us laugh the most, we love magic because it amazes and surprises us, and we love the upset victory, the Cinderella story, and the impossible goal in sports in large part because they surprise us.

To me, something similar should happen with great mathematical ideas. We don’t talk about the fact that 1+1=2 very often – it is just as true as the Pythagorean theorem, but it is too obvious to be of much interest. Another reason this is more surprising than 1+1=2 is because it is a broader statement. This is not a mere calculation. Your calculator can’t do this. This is not a calculation about a particular shape, this is a statement about the way that all right triangles are. So we learn far more from the Pythagorean theorem than we ever could from building lots of triangles and measuring their sides, because there would always be more triangles we hadn’t measured yet.

But how do you know this is true? Well, this is where proofs come in. There are literally entire books published that contain nothing but hundreds of different and creative proofs of this statement, including a proof by Albert Einstein and one by American President James Garfield, plus the original proof discovered and written down by the Greeks themselves. The proof that I have chosen to present is the one that I find the simplest and most enjoyable.

Proof of the Pythagorean Theorem:

This proof centers around two key ideas and a little cleverness. The two main ideas we will need are (1) Two shapes that have the same dimensions have the same area, and (2) if two shapes have the same area, and if we remove from both shapes identical pieces, then the new shapes still have the same area. These two statements are just part of what area is, so this is a good starting point. Now, we need to use these ideas in a clever way. We will do so with two conveniently-drawn squares. Consider first “Square 1”:

The green triangles in this image are all identical to each other – in fact, these are right triangles with side lengths a, b, and c. There are also two smaller squares, with side lengths a and b respectively. Square 1 itself has side length a+b. We will use this information to work out some areas later.

Now, lets look at a different square, which we will call “Square 2″:

Square 2 also has four green triangles, which are identical to the green triangles in Square 1. There is also a square of side length c in the inside of Square 2. Finally, notice that Square 2 also has side length a+b.

Now, we can compare these two squares. Square 1 and Square 2 are both squares with side length a+b, and so are identical shapes. So, using idea (1) from the beginning, we know that the area of Square 1 is the same as the area of Square 2. We can also look at the pieces of these two squares. Both squares have four identical green triangles, and these have the same area. Since Square 1 and Square 2 have the same area, and idea (2) tells us that we can remove the four green triangles from each and the resulting shapes will still have the same area as each other. But what happens when we remove the green triangles from Squares 1 and 2? The remaining portions of Square 1 are the two small squares with side lengths a and b, which has total area a2+b2 and the remaining portion of Square 2 is the square with side length c, which has area c2. Since these total areas must be the same, we now know that a2 + b2 = c2.

There it is! I encourage you to reread the proof a few times if you don’t quite feel like you understand. It often takes multiple readings to get a handle on what is happening. Take a look at the logic I used – are there gaps you can fill in? (For example, I opted to not explain why Square 1 and Square 2 actually are squares – can you explain this on your own?) When all is considered, this argument truly is airtight. I hope you will appreciate the beauty of the reasoning, it’s simplicity and cleverness. If not, then perhaps a different idea from math will be more appealing to you.

I hope people walk away with a greater understanding of what math is about, and perhaps some joy too. And feel free to write me about anything from your math class you’re curious about and would like to see proved!

From Numbers to “Pure” Math: Ancient Greece

In my previous post, I talked about the conceptual progression from the most basic intuitions about counting to the more general idea of number that transcends any particular physical situation.

As big a development as this is, I would say this not mathematics proper. In most civilizations where the number concept developed, the most complicated uses of number were related to measurements – something like geometry. Many ancient civilizations, for example, knew that a triangle formed out of ropes of lengths 3 units, 4 units, and 5 units formed a right angle (that is, a perfect 90 degree corner), and so that was often used to help place markers for rectangular fields. Many ancient peoples also had numerical approximations for some important numbers, though they probably did not think of them as “approximations” in the same way we do today. Details about ancient mathematics can be found without too much trouble via a search engine or a book on math history, it is fascinating to read about, but I won’t go into much more detail here.

The idea of precision we are used to today took a long time time to develop. Ideas involving number were presented until comparatively recently only as “word problems.” This is because the written symbols for numbers largely had not been developed, or were very cumbersome. (To see what I mean by cumbersome, imagine trying to multiply or divide using Roman numerals!) Most ancient peoples viewed numerical work as strictly practical, or in some cases spiritual elements may have been involved (as in some ancient astronomy, for instance). In any case, maximizing the precision was not really the goal, the goal was to be ‘good enough’ to use in everyday life. For example, consider the number we call pi today:

$\pi = 3.1415926535...$

This constant is equal to the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter, and is very important in geometry and in every area of math. There were some civilizations, like ancient Babylon, that seem to have treated this number as being exactly the fraction 25/8, which written as a decimal is equal to 3.125 [1]. We know today that pi is not equal to 3.125. In fact, today we know that the constant pi is something called an irrational number, which means there is no fraction equal to pi. But an ancient mathematician either didn’t know that 25/8 was not equal to pi, or they didn’t care that much. What they considered important was that the numerical methods got “close enough” to make something work correctly, and little else mattered. It is true that we use approximate values for pi all the time in calculations – computers cannot store irrational numbers exactly, and so they use approximations, and engineers will frequently round off their solutions. But even here, there is precision, because when an engineer does this, they are aware that they are using an inexact value, and they even have ways of keeping track of how much they have rounded off their answers. The awareness of the ‘inexactness’ of the rounded values either was not in the mind of these ancient civilizations, or they simply did not care.

While many peoples did make huge developments in advanced mathematics in ancient times, China and India stand out to me, the way mathematics was done in ancient Greece was a highly influential and new approach. Speaking as a mathematician, I would say that the huge change that began in Greece was the introduction of rigorous argument to mathematics. What this really means is, unlike peoples before them, the Greeks did not content themselves with application and approximation. They wanted to know why certain facts about numbers are as they are, and they wanted to know beyond any possible doubt. This was a revolutionary approach.

The way Greek mathematicians started this was by making unambiguous definitions of what objects like circles and lines actually are. They also laid out clearly a set of basic assumptions that serve as the rules of geometry. In that day, the tools of geometry were a compass – which is a tool for drawing circles, and a straightedge – which is any perfectly straight object (like a ruler, except a straightedge does not have markings on it like a ruler does). The straightedge tool came along with some rules – for example, every straight line segment can be extended. The compass also has an associated rule – every circle is defined by a point (its center) and a distance (its radius). These rules bring clarity about what circles and lines are. A circle isn’t some vaguely round thing, a circle is a shape all of whose points are exactly the same distance from some central point. In a similar fashion, the Greeks made explicit certain key concepts about angles, areas, and volumes.

Within a clear, structured framework, the Greeks could then find theorems, and used proofs to explain them. In mathematics, a theorem is just any true statement about math, and a proof is a bulletproof explanation for why a certain statement is true. It is worth noting that no other discipline, including physics and other sciences, have a concept of proof anywhere near this powerful. A scientist would usually be content to say a scientific theory is proven, roughly speaking, if it has a large body of empirical evidence in its favor, and very little evidence against it by comparison. This does not count as a mathematical proof, because empirical evidence could always have an exception that we just don’t know how to find. While the mathematician will frequently use empirical data to help them formulate their ideas, a mathematical proof relies only on logical argument. For this reason, a genuine mathematical proof literally cannot be mistaken, in the sense that if you accept that words like true and false actually mean something, and if you accept the conceptual framework of Greek geometry, then you cannot deny any theorem of Greek geometry.

To be fair on this point, you can always reject the framework. You can start with different definitions and assumptions if you want to, there is nothing to stop you from doing that. But by making different assumptions, you of course aren’t really doing Greek geometry anymore, you are doing some other kind of geometry that might turn out differently than Greek geometry, but it does not invalidate what the Greek geometers did.

Up to this point, I have yet to actually present a proof. I will do this in my next post, where we will talk about the most famous theorem of Greek mathematics today, the Pythagorean theorem. But before we can truly understand what the Pythagorean theorem is and what its proof means, it is important to have in mind this landmark intellectual achievement of the ancient Greeks, to which all who study mathematics today are indebted for their great contribution.

[1] Heaton, Luke. A Brief History of Mathematical Thought. London, Constable & Robinson Ltd. 2015.

Math is More Than Calculation

Before attempting to start talking about what math is and why I am so interested in it, I want to clarify what it is not. What I’d call math is probably is not what you learned in school. I think a better label for what most people think of when they hear “math” is calculation. What is taught in school, or at least the way a lot of people approach what is taught in school, is memorized methods for arriving at results. You memorize your times tables, you memorize how to add fractions, you memorize the quadratic formula. Note the repeated use of the word “memorize.” You learn that certain techniques are right, and try to replicate them. And that’s the end of it. No questions asked. When we do calculation, we do essentially the same thing a computer does. We receive instructions and execute those instructions.

So if calculation is not mathematics, what is? I don’t really take issue with calculation; memorizing certain techniques is quite useful. There is a place for that in math, just like learning basic vocabulary has an important place in English class. But in English, you don’t stop there. The problem with math classes, or the way people approach them, is that most people stop at calculation. I think the best way to express what I mean is to share how I first fell in love with math.

I was in second grade. We had already learned our times tables, and we were beginning to learn problems like 32 times 28 using the following method:

\begin{aligned} & 32 \\ \underline{\textnormal{x}} & \underline{28} \\ 2 & 56 \\ +\underline{6} & \underline{40} \\ 8 & 96\end{aligned}

In case you didn’t learn this method, the general idea is that you multiply 8 by 32, and make that result a new row, you then place one zero in the next row, and then place 2 times 32 to the left of the zero. The last step is to add together the two rows.

I had already been curious about multiplication when I learned how to do something like 32 times 8, but got even more curious when I learned this way to multiply numbers like 32 and 28. It caught my imagination. I wanted to know why we did things this way. I thought about it, and it took a while but I eventually came up with some ideas. I knew that multiplication was about grouping things together, that is, the sentence “2 times 4 equals 8” can be rephrased as “2 groups of 4 make a total of 8”. Now, say we have 28 groups of 32 people. This is really the same thing as 20 groups plus 8 more groups, and I realized this is why you had the two rows, one for the 8 and one for the 20. I also knew that 20 = 2 x 10, and so 32 x 20 = 32 x 2 x 10. So, the 0 at the right side of the second row is there because of the 10, and the other work is just 32 x 2. So I started to see why we were doing things this way.

Around this time, I had an idea that made me even more curious. I thought that, perhaps, the same thing will work for bigger numbers. If I wanted to do 789 x 123, for example, couldn’t I make add together three rows, one for 100, one for 20, and one for 3? And since the row for 10 had one zero, I should put two 0’s on the row for 100. In the notation from earlier, I thought that maybe this would work:

\begin{aligned} &789 \\ \underline{\textnormal{x}} & \underline{123} \\ 2 & 367 \\ 15 & 780 \\ +\underline{78} & \underline{900} \\ 97 & 047 \end{aligned}

We hadn’t learned this yet, so I went to my teacher after school, very excited, and asked her if that was correct. She told me it was right! I was really happy and proud, but it got better. I could see now that the size of the number didn’t matter, I could use the same trick! This teacher graciously helped me learn more math after school when she could, and let me use her whiteboards to multiply huge numbers together for fun. What I had noticed I later learned had a name – the distributive law. We normally write this as

$A \times (B + C) = A \times B + A \times C$

What I had noticed in multiplying numbers like 32 and 28 is that the “standard method” we were being taught was taking advantage of this rule in the following way:

$32 \times 28 = 32 \times (20 + 8) = 32 \times 20 + 32 \times 8$

The additional step I noticed is that you can use the same rule for larger numbers like this:

$789 \times 123 = 789 \times (100 + 20 + 3) = 789 \times 100 + 789 \times 20 + 789 \times 3$

Challenge for the Reader: Don’t just take my word for it! Convince yourself that the distributive property still work when more than two numbers are being added together.

This may sound weird to some, but I would probably rank this moment in the top five or ten most joyful moments of my life, and spurred a strange excitement with doing long and arduous multiplication problems. It was never calculating in and of itself that I enjoyed, though there is a sort of childish glee looking at incomprehensibly large numbers written on a whiteboard. The reason this moment had such an impact on me is because this wasn’t just something I’d been taught, this was something I discovered on my own. I understood where it came from, I knew how to explain it, and most importantly, I found it on my own.

This, I would say, is what math is really about. It is about understanding not just how things are, but why they are that way. It is about finding patterns, asking questions, and discovering why we see the patterns we do. Even more than this, math is an art form that transcends time and language. In the words of G.H. Hardy in his classic essay A Mathematician’s Apology, “A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.”

The difference between a calculation and true mathematics is like the difference between a road sign and Shakespeare. Both are written word, but the first is dull and the second is artistry. A simple calculation on a receipt is dull, but the writings of the great mathematicians of the past are works of art. To quote Hardy again, “there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.” We hardly glance at road signs, but we still read Shakespeare hundreds of years after his death. So it is with great mathematics.

So what does real mathematics look like? What does it mean to show why a pattern is true? Why do I and so many others find mathematics so incredibly fascinating? These will be topics for posts soon to come. But if you learn anything from this post, calculation and mathematics are not the same thing!

Where Did Numbers Come From?

In my last post, I argued that a distinction needs to be made between calculation and math. But certainly these are related, because calculation is about numbers, and math uses a lot of numbers. So what exactly is the connection?

Working from my own experience being trained to be a mathematician and educator, as well as from all I have learned about the history of math through the years, it seems fair to say that math arose primarily out of calculation. But these are not identical – it could equally well be said that poetry arose from the most primitive forms of communication, but that in no way means that literature can be reduced to the musings of a civilization that only just begun to develop language. So it is with mathematics.

A particular paradigm shift within the development of language will be useful to talk about. Language most naturally would have began as a tool for describing things around us and visible to us. Whenever words capable of going outside these limits began to emerge, the power of language would greatly increase. In particular, the ability to tell a story is revolutionary. Stories necessarily require some degree of abstract language. You need to be able to talk about times other than right now, places other than right here, things and people that you cannot see, or have never seen, or that might even not exist at all. Development from specific, immediately present events and objects to more abstract, broader concepts would greatly increase the power of language. When you can tell a story, you can also explain why things are the way they are, not just what they are.

Mathematics has a nearly identical progression. Naturally, counting physical objects is where math started. The very most ancient form of counting would not have looked much like we think of it today, either. What we do is more abstract. Say, for instance, that you have some tools that you keep track of, and that you nor anyone around you has yet developed any idea of counting things or of numbers. You still want to keep track of your tools, so you probably want to come up with a way to check whether you have them all. One way to resolve this dilemma would be to learn some verbal pattern that you’d rattle off as you pick up your tools, some pattern of sounds or movements you remember well. These rituals would most likely have been be something rhythmic, like a chant at a sporting event or musical lyrics. Perhaps you pick up one tool for every line of your jingle, or in some way you can remember. Every day, you finish picking up your tools as soon as your memorized ritual is over. If one day, you finished gathering all your tools but you hadn’t finished yet, you’d conclude that someone took something from you!

That is likely something like how things began. Notice that nowhere is the idea of a number mentioned. You don’t need number to do this. All you need is some vague notion of “more” and of “less,” and for day-to-day life that would serve you very well. In fact, this is also how we count today. We all memorize the same ritual. Our ritual sounds like “one, two, three, four, …” and so on. This is the essence of counting at its beginnings. With this comparison, we can already begin to see how things might develop. Perhaps disputes that involve what we now call counting led people to realize that having a shared ritual for counting objects would be beneficial for solving disputes. I certainly don’t claim to be an expert on these things, it is quite possible some of what I said is not quite right. But there is some reading behind this, and it does seem like this is a quite plausible account of how humans could gradually develop a counting system.

Like with language, the paradigm shift here occurs when things get more abstract. Today, we know what “two” means, even if we are not told what it is there are two of. In terms of the previous discussion, this is because we understand where “two” belongs in our ritual. But over time, this understanding develops beyond the ritual, and we start to think of the number 2 as a concept in and of itself. Concepts like number and shape, just slightly more abstract than what we see with out senses, radically change how humans were able to socialize.

With this background, it is now easier for me to explain what math is. One possible attempt at defining mathematics is the effort towards understanding concepts like number, shape, and measurement. It is not really about any particular number of trees or cows, or the shape of any particular cave or mountain, but about the ideas of number and shape themselves. For example, there are many round things, and when we do mathematics, we want to understand what roundness is. When we study number, we want to discover rules that we can use to count things.

Hopefully, this has provided something of an introduction to what math is and its history. Later on, I hope to go more in depth into some of the mathematical techniques of ancient civilizations like Egypt, Babylon, and China, because they truly did develop remarkable insights for their time. The next big transition in the history of mathematics came with the ancient Greeks. Even though Greek mathematics is roughly 2000 years old, the work done in this marvelous ancient civilization is in many important ways very similar to what is done in universities today. That key development will be the topic the next post.

What is This Blog?

Welcome! My name is Will Craig. As of this writing, I am a PhD student in mathematics at the University of Virginia. My current aim is to be a university professor. I greatly love both teaching people about various kinds of mathematics as well as working on modern research topics in number theory. I also enjoy reading and learning about pretty much anything, but especially philosophy, theology and religion, and the various sciences.

The title I’ve started off with for my blog is “Mathematical Apologetics”. To unpack what this means, we first must understand the word apologetics. This word has little to do with the English word apologize; rather, it derives from the Greek word apologia, which is a term which means “to give a defense.” This English term apologetics is a noun form of apologia, and an apologist is a person who does apologetics. It is used to denote someone defending a position or belief using some kind of reasons and evidence. This term is most commonly used in the context of defending a belief related to philosophy or religion; so you may have Christian apologists, atheist apologists, Muslim apologists, and so on.

The reason I’ve given the blog this name is two-fold. Firstly, I have loved math for nearly my whole life. And I don’t mean “math is my favorite subject” kind of love, I mean in the same way that a singer loves music or a painter loves a masterpiece. It is one step short of obsession. Math can be breath-taking, subtle, deep, and remarkably beautiful if you know where to look. Most professional mathematicians think of their mathematics as something comparable to an art form, but this idea has been portrayed most famously and poignantly in the great twentieth century mathematician G.H. Hardy’s classic essay entitled A Mathematician’s Apology. In this essay, Hardy takes the role of an apologist for the discipline of pure mathematics (that is, math that does not necessarily apply to the real world). While I do not fully agree with everything in the book, I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to know what it is like to be a mathematician.

I will say I agree with the core of his essay, which views mathematics as primarily a form of creative art, and since I also consider myself an apologist for this idea, I gave the blog this title as a way of paying homage to that great essay. It has been very frustrating that this side of mathematics is never seen, with all emphasis placed on “application to the real world.” It takes the fun out of it. Imagine if in art class you just learned how to paint walls one solid color, or perhaps you learn how to paint a stop sign. How much would everyone hate art class if that’s all you did? Sadly, math class today is a lot like that. One of my goals here is to present as best I can the beautiful, interesting, fun side of mathematics.

The second reason for this name is that I hope to discuss issues important to me outside mathematics in the manner of an apologist, using my background as a mathematician. Just as I believe most people misunderstand what mathematics is truly about, I think most of what is important to me is also greatly misunderstood. Modern “debate and discussion” is not only mostly unproductive, but harmful both intellectually and emotionally. And quite often, it seems like people have never tried to carefully understand those they disagree with, or to really understand deeply what they believe. There are plenty of exceptions to this, of course, but that we have any public figures at all engaging in such nonsense is saddening.

I hope to take the skills I’ve been developing that are important to mathematical thought and carry them into other areas in which I am interested. This will focus on areas outside of math about which I am most interested, and which matter the most to me. I plan on including issues of emotional/mental health, religious and philosophical topics, and some of the hard and soft sciences, as these are all important and interesting to me. I hope by taking the approach of a mathematician, I can try to calmly understand both sides of important issues, and to avoid common misconceptions. I hope that taking the perspective of a mathematician will bring a point of view that is not often seen or considered.

As a closing note, I also hope to have a Q&A aspect to the blog in addition to talking about what interests me. I have set up an email address for the blog, mathematicalapologist@gmail.com so anyone who wants to know more about the blog, about what I do as a mathematician, or has general suggestions or questions can contact me from the “About the Blog” page and I’ll reply as quickly as I am able to. Hope everyone enjoys the blog, and hopefully learns something.