Henrietta Hay's Column

My son Dave very nearly became an innumerate. That is the mathematical counterpart of an illiterate. All through grade school he thought of arithmetic with the same enthusiasm as "clean your room." But then he hit junior school and landed in the class of a young red headed math teacher named Roe Willis. Under the guidance of that master teacher, math became a wonderful adventure which has continued all his life. He was lucky.

Recently I found a fascinating little book called "Innumeracy: mathematical illiteracy and its consequences" by John Allen Paulos. The author says, "Innumeracy, an inability to deal comfortably with the fundamental notions of number and chance, plagues far too many otherwise knowledgeable citizens. Unlike other failings which are hidden, mathematical illiteracy is often flaunted: 'I'm a people person, not a number person,' or 'I always hated math.'"

In the modern world, the inability to deal rationally with numbers is very dangerous. We are inundated by numbers and it is vital that we learn to interpret them accurately. The author is concerned that innumeracy makes us susceptible to things like stock scams, psychics, many diet and medical claims, sex discrimination, UFO's and others. And what's more, he gives examples to prove it mathematically.

I have always enjoyed math, not because I know very much about it, but because it is the one subject in which I always believed I could find a positive answer. None of this, "Well maybe" or "There are too many unknowns to get an answer." But that is not necessarily true. Even pure mathematics is not absolute. Paulos says, "Almost equally important is the interplay between ideal Platonic abstracts, and their possible interpretation in the real world." 1 + 1 = 2, doesn't it? Not necessarily. If one cup of popcorn is added to one cup of water, you do not end up with 2 cups of soggy popcorn.

We are scared of big numbers. After all, if we are talking about a national budget in the trillions of dollars, what's another billion or two? A lot! He suggests that we might get a better idea of the magnitude of numbers if we know that it takes eleven and a half days for a million seconds to tick away. But it takes 32 years for a billion seconds to pass. Since we are talking a lot today about trillions, we should know that Homo Sapiens is probably less than 10 trillion seconds old. Agriculture has been around for 300 billion seconds (10,000 years), writing for 150 billion seconds and rock music for only one billion seconds (it just seems like more).

One discussion of probability involves Julius Caesar. According to Shakespeare, as Caesar breathed his last he said, "Et tu, Brute?" Now, take a deep breath. What are the chances that you just inhaled a molecule which Caesar exhaled in his dying breath? Believe it or not, the probability is 99%. I'll spare you the math but the author didn't. Reading this book and trying to write about it has shown me again why I am a skeptic. I have trouble believing things which can be mathematically proven wrong. Take UFO's. Taking into account the number of stars in our galaxy, 100 billion, and calculations which estimate the number which might support planets, possibly a million, we still come up against distance. The average distance between any one of the galaxy's life supporting stars and its closest neighbor would be about 500 light years, roughly ten billion times the distance between the earth and the moon. The chances of someone dropping in for coffee are a little remote. My friend the philosopher, who claims to be a mathophobic science fiction fan (an oxymoron if I ever heard one), says time warps and wormholes explain the whole thing.

Why is innumeracy so widespread among otherwise educated people? The author theorizes that the reasons are lack of emphasis on math in the educational system, psychological blocks, and romantic misconceptions about the nature of mathematics. Whatever the cause, it really needs to be stamped out in our modern world.

The only professional mathematician I ever met, when asked where he works, replied, "In the bathtub." Maybe that explains innumeracy. Most of us take showers.