So, why math?

The short version of the answer is remarkably simple: math provides
a tool where you can, without ambiguity, prove that something is true or false.

I’ll get back to that – but first, I’m going to make a quick diversion, to help you understand my basic viewpoint on things.

This blog actually started in response to something specific. I was reading
Orac’s blog “Respectful Insolence”, and
he was fisking a study published by the Geiers, purporting to show a change in the trend in autism diagnoses. Orac was attacking it on multiple bases, but it struck me
that the most obvious problem with it was that it was, basically, a mathematical argument, but the math was blatantly wrong. It was making a classic statistical analysis mistake which is covered in first-year statistics courses. (And I mean
that very literally: when I was in college, I lazily satisfied some course requirements by taking a statistics course given by the Poly Sci department, and
in statistics for political scientists, they covered exactly the error made by the Geiers in November of the fall semester.) It struck me that while there were a lot of really great science bloggers – people like Orac, PZ Myers, Tara Smith, and so on – that I didn’t know of anyone doing the same thing with math.

So I started this blog on Blogger. And my goals for the blog have never changed. What
I’ve wanted to do all along is:

1. To show people the beauty of math. Math is really wonderful. It’s
   fun, it’s beautiful, it’s useful. But people are taught from
   an early age that it’s useless, hard, and miserable. I want to show
   otherwise, by describing the beauty of math in ways that are approachable
   and understandable by non-mathematicians.
2. To help people recognize when someone is trying to put something past
   them by abusing math – what I call obfuscatory mathematics. Because so many people don’t know math, hate it,
   think it’s incomprehensible, that makes it easy for dishonest people
   to fool them. People throw together garbage in the context of a mathematical
   argument, and use it to lend credibility to their arguments. By pointing
   out the basic errors in these things, I try to help show people how to
   recognize when someone is try to use math to confuse them or trick them.
3. To show people that they use and rely on math far more than they think.
   This relates back to the first point, but it’s important enough to
   justify its own discussion. Lots of people believe that they can’t
   understand math, and avoid it like the plague. But at the same time, they’re
   using it every day – they just don’t know it. My favorite example
   of this is from my own family. My older brother had a string of truly horrible
   math teachers, and was convinced that he was horrible at math, couldn’t
   understand it, couldn’t do it. You couldn’t even try to teach it to him,
   because he was so sure that he couldn’t do it that he’d psych himself out
   before he even started. But he’s a really smart guy. When he went to college,
   he studied music. I visited him at one point, and was watching him do an
   assignment for his music theory course, where they were studying something
   called serial composition. He was analyzing a musical score – and what
   he was doing to analyze it was taking determinants of matrices in mod-12
   arithmetic! Of course, he didn’t know that that was what he was
   doing; instead of the numbers 0 through 11, he was using the notes of the
   musical scale. But it was taking a determinant, just using a different
   symbol set. He had no trouble doing that; but try to teach him to compute
   a percentage, and he’ll insist not just that he can’t do it, but that
   he’s incapable of learning to do it. That kind of thing is
   all too common – people do math every day, without knowing it. If they
   understood whata they were doing, they might be open to learning more,
   to being able to do more themselves – but because they’ve been taught
   that they can’t do it, they don’t see that they do.

This will come around back to my basic point; keep reading below the fold.

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