My answer on Quora to the question Are mathematicians gifted people?

I do not know for which my sins Quora bombards me with questions about giftedness, IQ, etc. For several years I tried to ignore them, but finally I realised that I have to formulate my position.

Yes, professional mathematicians possess some mental traits and skills which majority of population do not have. But these traits are not what is called “gift”, “talent”, “ability” in the mass culture; they remained unnoticed, unregistered in the public discourse about mathematics and mathematics education. However, my mathematician friends, when we discuss this topic, know what I am talking about.

IQ is mostly irrelevant to discussion of mathematical “ability”; specific traits of mathematical thinking belong to a much higher cognitive level than skills tested in IQ tests.

A simple example: I had seen once how an eight years old boy was solving some standard puzzle (not of IQ type), with some pattern of hexagons which had to be filled with integers from 0 to 9 so that certain sums were equal — you perhaps had seen this boring stuff . At some point he paused and commented: “Hmm, I have to somehow move information from this corner to that corner”. Moreover, after some thought he had successfully moved the information. This was meta-thinking, ability to reflect on one’s thinking, ability to look at the problem from above. This boy now is quite a successful student in one of the best university mathematics departments in the world, in a pipeline to becoming a professional research mathematician.

Perhaps you have heard this definition:

“Mathematics is the science of patterns”.

IQ tests pay much attention to the speed of pattern recognition. It is a useful skill, but it is not a sign of mathematical abilities. In my life, I had a chance to see a lot of children and teenagers who had an instinct (or maybe it was a trait absorbed in the family?), to look deeper and try to detect the structure behind the pattern — and the boy mentioned above was one of them. Indeed, the simplest description of mathematics is

“Mathematics is the science of structures behind patterns”.

Perhaps my personal experience is outdated, but I was privileged to go through a viciously academically selective system of mathematics education — see my paper “Free Maths Schools”: some international parallels. Aged 14, at a Summer School which was the final step of selection to the specialist boarding school described in the paper, I and my friends were subjected to a battery of IQ tests — which, however, had no relation to admission to the school.

We were tested by professional experimental psychologists who were commissioned by the Soviet Army to study and assess reliability of the IQ tests used by the US Army for assignment of conscripts to particular duties (you see how long ago it was). The psychologists translated real American IQ tests into Russian and tried them on various groups of population. They were excited to discover that our performance refuted a claim that apparently was universally accepted at that time: that practicing IT tests could not improve results.

Indeed our results were quickly improving beyond applicability of tables for conversion of counts of correct answers into IQ scores. Why? Because we did not practice IQ tests — we had access only to tests which we have already taken — but, after every test, we spent hours classifying test questions, analysing them, inventing our own questions and challenging each other to solve them, and we did that in a collective discussion, in brain storming sessions, attacking problems like a pack of enthusiastic young wolves. Perhaps we had already had some specific habits of mathematicians; but there was nothing special about that, even some 8 year old kids might have them, as I have already said.

As I explain in my paper that I mentioned above, in the selection process for my mathematics boarding school, and in the school itself, the use of words gifted, talented, able was explicitly forbidden — they were seen as misleading and divisive.

I am a staunch believer that majority (maybe even all) kids have strong potential for understanding and mastering mathematics. Unfortunately, their mathematical traits are systematically suppressed in the mainstream school mathematics education — mostly because many teacher have no idea what it is about.

You may wish to take a look at my papers, they say more:

A. V. Borovik,  Mathematics for makers and mathematics for users, in Humanizing Mathematics and its Philosophy: Essays Celebrating the 90th Birthday of Reuben Hersh (B. Sriraman ed.), Birkhauser, 2017, pp. 309–327.

A. V . Borovik and A. D. Gardiner, Mathematical abilities and mathematical skills, The De Morgan Journal 2 no. 2 (2012) 75-86.

My answer to a question in Quora: What is exact definition of mathematics?

I share my small collection of  descriptions of mathematics; some of them sound as attempts to define mathematics.

I. Mathematics is an exact language for description, calculation, deduction, modeling, and prediction — more a systematic way of thinking than a set of rules.

II. Using a legal analogy, mathematics is a language for writing contracts with Nature that Nature accepts as legally binding.

III. The practical importance of mathematics lies in its ability to describe the real world.

The real world consists of what matters. The word “matter” as a noun is used for what the physical world is made of. But if we ask, “What’s the matter with Anne?” we may be asking about a physical ailment, or we may be asking about an idea that is causing Anne to behave strangely. Ideas matter.

The whole point of mathematical education is to make ideas real for students, ideas that were not real for them before. Ideas like fractions, for example. The fact that 2/3 is smaller than 3/4 matters in the real world.

IV. Mathematically educated people are stem cells of a technologically advanced society. Because of the universality of mathematics, mathematicians and well educated users of mathematics are flexible in applying and inventing tools for work in technological environments which never existed before

V. Learning mathematics involves the profound assimilation of intellectual and aesthetic criteria as well as practically orientated ones. The very difficulty in learning mathematics makes it a personality-enhancing experience.

[The above are borrowings from David Corfield, Tony Gardiner, Michael Gromov, Frank Quinn, David Pierce — I do not remember now in which order.]

VI. Mathematics is a part of physics. Physics is an experimental science, a part of natural science. Mathematics is the part of physics where experiments are cheap. — Vladimir Arnold

VII. Mathematics is the music of reason  — James Joseph Sylvester

VIII.  Mathematics is the study of mental objects with reproducible properties. — Philip J Davis and Reuben Hersh

VIII. Finally, my own extension of the thesis by Davis and Hersh:

Mathematics the study of mental constructs with reproducible properties which imitates the causality structures of the physical universe but is expressed in the human language which evolved for social interactions.

My answer to a question on Quora:

Why is math taught differently in school today? What is wrong with the way we learned it twenty years ago?

New technological and economic environment requires a different set of mathematical skills, and taught differently, and — this is the big unmentionable — taught to much smaller number of students. What we see are death throes of the existing system of mathematics education. Politicians are keen to keep the old system of mathematics education for everyone, and for good reason — this is what their electorate expects from them.

This is why there is so much confusion of what, and now, has to be taught at school – in absence of clear economic criteria, anything goes. I heard statements, made by professional mathematics educationalist at meetings at the Department of Education, of the kind: “Why school curriculum should contain fractions? Who of people present here had lately add 3/4 and 7/5? Read more in my papers Mathematics for makers and mathematics for users and Calling a spade a spade: Mathematics in the new pattern of division of labour.

My answer to a question on Quora: Do physicists or mathematicians actually memorize hundreds of equations?

Some (I think rare) mathematicians have excellent memory and can remember a lot of stuff. Most of them, however, do not memorise every equation / theorem / definition; they keep in their heads generalised — but well structured —images of their fields and can recover a necessary fact or definition frоm “first principles”. Mathematics is not a sum of facts, it is a system of connections between facts and connections between connections, a system of analogies, and, at a higher level of thinking, analogies between analogies.

Added later: Perhaps I have to emphasise one point: “recovery” (as opposed to “remembering”) is fast because it is frequently used in its incomplete form, something like that “ah yes, and here we shall use this and that theorem…” without recalling the exact formulation of the theorem — and then immediately moving further in the argument. Why this is done? Because in most cases a specific argument will fail at later stages anyway; filling in all details in all intermediate steps is waste of time. Details are filled in only when the logical skeleton of a proof starts to look feasible. In many cases the argument / proof fails at the stage of a final write-up, and had to be started again. Mathematical thinking is a chain of failures; the key obstacle to learning mathematics is failure to learn how to manage one’s failures.

My answer to question on Quora: Why aren’t mathematicians more well known?

Well, this applies to every high-level specialism. Do you know many designers of new electronics? Or neurosurgeons?

This is a very uncomfortable social issue: development of technology, and perhaps the survival (or not) of humanity — critically depends on work of a very small (in relation to the total population of the Earth), and increasingly so, number of people. Mathematics is everywhere around us, but it is totally invisible to 99.99% percents of its users. Mathematics hardwired into a mobile phone ( I am not even talking about smartphones) and in mobile phones networks is beyond understanding of 99% of graduates from mathematics departments of British universities — and now there are more mobile phones in the world than toothbrushes.

My answer to a question on Quora: Why isn’t math presented as a language at school?

As usual, an answer is rather frustrating: because mathematics is taught on the cheap, and by teachers who have not been properly educated themselves (and they should not be blamed for that).

Mathematics has many aspects, and most of them remain unknown to many learners — and teachers — of mathematics. Of all metaphorical descriptions of mathematics, one of my favorites is

Mathematics is a language of contracts with Nature which Nature accepts as binding.

Within mathematics, people talk about “language of set theory”, or “language of categories”, or “language of algebraic topology”, or “language of schemes” — the list could be continued almost indefinitely.

To teach mathematics as a language means, first of all, giving students a chance to see that the same problem can formulated, say, in the language of algebra and in the language of geometry, and see the advantages and drawbacks of the two languages, and translate from one language to another, and combine both in a solution. This can be done — but this will be more expensive. Most school systems in the world cannot afford that; richer countries can afford that, but there is no political will to do that. Indeed, what for?

There is another aspect of mathematics which is almost never mentioned: in humans, mathematics is done by the subconscious, and mathematical languages are to certain degree languages of communication with the subconscious. I wrote about that elsewhere. If you want me to continue discussion of that fascinating facet of mathematics, please leave a comment to this post.

My answer to a question on Quora: Why is school 8 hours long?

Admittedly it was in primordial times, but, in my country, at my time at primary school (7 to 11 years old), school day was 4 lessons of 45 minutes long, with two breaks of 10 minutes and one break of 25 minutes in between, from 8:30 to 12:30 in the morning. There was some homework, but not very taxing. A plenty of time was free for whatever children wished to occupy themselves with. Parents were at work until 17:00.

A short school day is actually a physiological norm. Why in the UK, say, school day is abnormally long? Because it is an offence to leave children alone; the law is vague — The law on leaving your child on their own, but it applies with unnecessary, in my opinion, rigour. Schools are forced to act as storage rooms for children while parents are at work.

Of course, in old times there were risks involved; legs and arms could occasionally be broken while skiing (unsupervised), or playing ice hockey (also unsupervised), etc., but these were very rare events, and were seen as unavoidable and normal risks. There were no modern culture of over-protection which would, of course, cut accidents — but at expense of loss of child’s precious independence. Analysing now my and my friends’ behaviour of that time, I see that we were quite risk aware and knew how to avoid danger — it was a normal part of growing up.

My answer to a question on Quora: How many years could it take me to study and understand all the mathematics fields that exist so far?

If you mean understanding at the level of ability to do research work in every field of mathematics, then, I am afraid, there is no hope to achieve this goal. Mathematics expands, and the cutting edge of mathematical research moves further and further away from any fixed reference point, say, undergraduate mathematics. From the point of view of an aspiring PhD student, mathematics looks like New York in the Capek Brothers’ book  A Long Cat Tale:

And New York – well, houses there are so tall that they can’t even finish building them. Before the bricklayers and tilers climb up them on their ladders, it is noon, so they eat their lunches and start climbing down again to be in their beds by bedtime. And so it goes on day after day.

It was written in the first half of the 20th century, but Joseph and Karel Capek understood thing or two about futurology (although the term “futurology”, most likely, did not exist in their time): they were the people who coined the word “robot”. We live in the world where, in almost every field of human endeavour, no-one can understand everything. The human civilization that we transform and build is immensely complex, and mathematics is perhaps its most complex part.

[For this post, I cannibalized some bits of my paper Mathematics for makers and mathematics for users; it discusses some relevant themes.]

The famous geneticist James Watson, of the double helix fame, about his relations with mathematics:

All through my undergraduate days I worried that my limited mathematical talents might keep me from being more than a naturalist.  In deciding to go for the gene, whose essence was surely in its molecular properties, there seemed no choice but to tackle my weakness head-on.  Not only was math at the heart of virtually all physics, but the forces at work in three-dimensional ;molecular structures could not be described except with math. Only by taking  higher math courses would I develop sufficient comfort to work at the leading edge of my field, even if I never got near the leading edge of math.  And so my Bs in two genuinely tough math courses were worth far more in confidence capital than any   I would likely have received in a biology course, no matter ;how demanding.  Though I would never use the full extent of the analytical methods I had learned, the Poisson distribution analyses needed to do most phage experiments soon became satisfying instead of a source of crippling anxiety. [From J. D. Watson, Avoid Boring People , Vintage Books, New York, 2010, p. 51]

My answer to a Quora question:

What’s something about math that still amazes you, even after knowing it for a long time?

That mathematics is consistent: regardless of how long and complicated are proofs, everything miraculously gets worked out without contradiction.

Mathematics is an ideal world; what strikes is its stability. You may revisit some its corner after being away for 30 years, and discover that everything there is the same as it was when you left it.