The same wan, inscrutable face addressed the world from the most prominent places–the front pages of newspapers, the covers of magazines, the opening minutes of the television news. It was the face of suspected Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski. It was also the face of mathematics.
“Of course I winced,” conceded John Ewing, executive director of the American Mathematical Society, as he recalled the moment he learned that the leading suspect was a figure from his own field. “I was hoping he was a chemist.”
Pausing a moment, he added, “My brother’s a chemist.”
As Kaczynski catapulted from obscurity to become for the time being the world’s most famous mathematician, academics in a field that is so rarely the stuff of front-page news and so often the stuff of derision expressed their worries. The world already thinks of mathematicians as weirdos, they said. Now what?
Even at the University of California at Berkeley math department, ranked first in the nation, mathematicians felt compelled to point out, as professor George Bergman did the other day, that mathematicians are not cold, inhuman “brains in a bottle.”
“Most of us have families and normal lives,” he said.
Unfortunately for Berkeley mathematicians, Kaczynski has just become their most famous former professor. Kaczynski worked as an assistant professor in the math department for two years before abruptly quitting in 1969.
Wayne Whitney, a 21-year-old graduate student in the Berkeley math program, noted that his roommate had taken stock of the Unabomber suspect’s background and nodded, “It makes sense that he was a mathematician.”
“I think the mathematics community is more accepting of oddballs,” said Bill Thurston, director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, a non-profit organization in Berkeley where experts from around the world come to present and attend seminars and to pursue their research.
“Sometimes people who are oddballs have good ideas. Who are the cranks, and who are the geniuses? It’s very hard to sort out, and sometimes they merge.”
Mathematicians knew they were regarded as lonely geeks long before the name Kaczynski surfaced. For a decade, the top professional societies have sponsored national Math Awareness Week, an excuse to convey to the outside world the virtues of the subject, and in some respects, the normality of mathematicians.
As this year’s observance approaches–it is scheduled April 22-27–the uproar over Kaczynski has only underscored practitioners’ deep insecurity over their field’s reputation and emphasized their nagging feeling that somehow chemists and physicists have managed to get better publicity than mathematicians.
“Every time I sit on an airplane and someone next to me asks what I do, I’d rather say I’m an IRS auditor than a mathematician,” Ewing admitted. “You always hear, `I was always terrible in math,’ or `I can’t balance my checkbook.’ It’s clear that math has a bad reputation.”
Mathematicians throughout the nation said the profession has yet to convey to the public the practical ways mathematical research surfaces in everyday life. The reasons the Internet works, the reason CAT scans and MRI tests show three-dimensional images, the reasons engineers can design virtually anything–all of these can be traced to math.
Complex analysis, the field Kaczynski studied in graduate school at the University of Michigan and pursued as an assistant professor at Berkeley, is an essential companion to engineering design.
“If challenged to do engineering without complex analysis, you could, but it would be like going with one hand tied behind your back,” said Berkeley professor Kenneth Ribet. “It would be a big handicap.”
Practical uses for mathematical research often don’t surface until decades later. “Applications from mathematics come inevitably, but unpredictably,” he said.
Ribet’s research forms part of the proof of Pierre de Fermat’s Last Theorem, a problem scribbled in the margin of a work by the 17th Century French mathematician that confounded scholars for generations.
It is, of course, difficult for people who work in a world of polynomial rings and imaginary numbers to convey the essence of their work.
“This led me to discover beautiful things about algebra,” Bergman said, head in hands, as he struggled to explain his Harvard dissertation, “Commuting Elements in Free Algebra and Related Topics in Ring Theory.”
“It’s sort of like the beauty of music. You can’t say a particular musical phrase is applicable. The beauty of music is the way it all fits together.”
Even within academia, mathematicians sometimes tend to feel slighted. Mathematics is often referred to as “the handmaiden of science,” a moniker that while suggesting its importance also can confer a lesser standing. The Nobel Prize is awarded in chemistry, physics, medicine, economics, literature and peace–but not in math.
Mathematicians’ fears that their work was not well understood were given some credence last year when the University of Rochester announced plans to eliminate its Ph.D. program in mathematics to cut costs. The plan was revised after protests from a broad spectrum of well-known scientists, including six Nobel laureates.
This is the general predicament Bergman alluded to in the opening remarks of a paper he wrote titled, “Everybody Knows What A Hopf Algebra Is.”
“What happens when we tell a non-mathematician our field?” Bergman asked. “Some years ago my parents told some friends-of-friends that their son did research in mathematics. `Research in mathematics?’ was the reply, `Don’t they know all the numbers already?’ “
