printable versionBy the ‘Numb3rs,’ Keith Devlin aims to make mathematics cool in popular culture
BY DAN STOBER
For his radio and TV work, as well as 13 general-audience books, newspaper columns, speaking engagements and trips to school classrooms, Keith Devlin has won the Carl Sagan Prize for popularizing science.
If you listen to National Public Radio on Saturdays, you've probably heard the infectious laugh and English accent of Keith Devlin, the talkative Stanford mathematician who moonlights as the "Math Guy" on Weekend Edition. If your tastes run to television, you may have witnessed Devlin's influence as you followed the plot of Numb3rs, the Friday night CBS show in which a curious young math wiz named Charlie solves crimes with mathematics.
For his radio and TV work, as well as 13 general-audience books, newspaper columns (The Guardian), speaking engagements (from the Swedish Blekinge Institute of Technology to the Carmel Authors and Ideas Festival) and trips to middle school classrooms, Devlin has won the Carl Sagan Prize for popularizing science. His never-ending crusade has a difficult, even quixotic, goal: making mathematics cool in popular culture—the equivalent of owning an iPhone or having 400 friends on Facebook. He'll be handed the Sagan Prize on Oct. 27 at Wonderfest, a celebration of science held at Stanford, the University of California-Berkeley and the Exploratorium in San Francisco. He'll undoubtedly have a few words to say.
"I've been kind of doing this thing on the side for most of my career," Devlin, 60, said in an interview. He squeezes out the time between his responsibilities as the executive director of the Center for the Study of Language and Information and as a consulting professor in the Department of Mathematics. He also is a co-founder of the Stanford Media X research network and of the university's Human Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute.
As a naturalized U.S. citizen with an interest in formal theories of reasoning and logic, Devlin has been an adviser to the CIA, warning analysts that failing to consider the context in which they interpret satellite photos (e.g., political pressure to find weapons of mass destruction) will distort their conclusions.
On a recent Friday, Devlin could be found sitting in a sound booth at the Stanford Video studio, occasionally sipping water while chatting remotely with host Ira Flatow during a guest appearance on NPR's Talk of the Nation: Science Friday. Devlin's latest book, The Numbers Behind NUMB3RS: Solving Crime with Mathematics, had given him another opportunity to talk up math education.
"I think the key to mathematics is motivation. And that's attached—when you're talking about young people—to being cool. Young kids don't want to be seen doing something that's not cool." Numb3rs, he told his radio audience, provides "this wonderful, cool, sexy image" to mathematics. Thousands of high school teachers are incorporating episodes of Numb3rs into their math curriculum.
After the radio show, Devlin lingered in the lobby of the studio to continue the conversation by expounding on one of his favorite themes: What's wrong with math education today? First of all, he says, the standard methods for teaching lower math (everything below calculus) are all wrong. Consider his own experience. Like other scientists of his age, the Math Guy can pinpoint the exact moment his fascination with science took off, literally. Fifty years ago, when Devlin was youngster living in Hull, England, he heard the news that the Russians had launched the world's first satellite. Sputnik ignited within him an interest in space flight and nuclear physics, but it was a path that would require a heavy dose of math as well. "The irony was that I wasn't even good at math,'' he says. He suffered through "five or six years of sheer boredom" toiling through the lower math of algebra, geometry and trigonometry.
He eventually worked his way to calculus, which was a surprising revelation of "absolute magic," a way to predict the flow of things, from blood in the vein to water in the river and money in the stock market. Math, not outer space, became his lifelong fascination: "From the age of 16, I've never wanted do anything else." Today, he's convinced there's a better way of teaching math.
Children learn to speak before they learn to write, and with good reason, he says. Speech is natural; reading and writing are not. He sees a lesson there for math teachers. Humans and other animals are wired with an innate skill for practical math, the type needed to calculate the rapidly changing angles, speeds and distances involved in, for example, chasing down a gazelle for dinner. Devlin says that hardwired talent is comparable to speech. But humans go beyond those innate abilities to create another math, an abstract form written in complex symbols.
This mathematics is much more difficult to learn. So, he asks, why is it taught to young children? To Devlin, that's "like teaching people to speak their own language by saying, 'First of all, you've got to read.'"
He argues that teaching lower math should involve more gazelles and fewer abstract symbols. He cites a Brazilian study in which young street vendors easily handled complex sales calculations but failed when given the same problems in a written test. Devlin thinks that clever virtual reality games—which kids already love—could provide a more instinctual approach to lower math.
On a high school level, the Math Guy's views on calculus run afoul of the prevailing AP culture of more is better. He believes only 10 to 20 percent of the U.S. population actually needs calculus. There's no point in treating all students as "future engineers," he says. Taking his own advice, he keeps the tone informal in his online column for the Mathematical Association of America. A recent column on probability was called, "The Professor, the Prosecutor and the Blonde with the Ponytail."
Devlin came to Stanford by way of colleges and universities in the United States, England, Germany and Mexico. He and his wife live in downtown Palo Alto, where they walk to their favorite restaurants. They have two grown daughters, one of whom works for Google, to her father's delight. In his off hours, Devlin can be found on a bicycle in the hills west of campus, moving uphill at a crisp pace.
Last year's Sagan Prize went to another Stanford researcher, biochemistry Professor Emeritus Paul Berg. The Wonderfest judges congratulated Berg and Devlin for carrying out Sagan's advice that "in exchange for freedom of inquiry, scientists are obliged to explain their work."