There was a time in my life when I was good at math. A long time ago. Thought early testing showed that I had an aptitude for it, for whatever reason, arithmetic never really engaged me beyond third grade and as school wore on, not only did my interest in math diminish, so did my seeming aptitude for the subject.
Maybe if numbers jazzed me as much as movies and words and people and music and stories and football and history and girls and Kung Fu reruns and – Well, point is, math made its way to the bottom of my list as I approached adolescence and pretty much stayed there.
I did B+ OK through high school, but by the time I got to college, I was actually plotting my major course work based on what track had the minimum math requirement. So I squeaked through undergrad taking only Basic Math, a course that was appropriately nicknamed “Math for Poets”, because a lot of athletes took the course and I can only assume that this was a reference to the poetry of their motion. English students rounded out the rest of the class roster.
Perhaps if I was more interested in math early in life and ultimately better at it, maybe I’d be working with the Large Hadron Collider somewhere in Geneva right now instead of tapping on a laptop in the middle of the nigh in Los Angeles…
Probably not.
The truth is, early “testing” aside, I don’t think I ever really had any extraordinary talent for math. In the beginning, math is one plus one, but when you start throwing pi and proofs and “x” times “that” around, it gets a lot more complex. So I don’t think I was any better at math as a kid as much as the problems I was solving early in my education simply weren’t all that complicated.
While I certainly don’t regret my ultimate field of pursuit, I do wish I had a greater grasp of math. But I also wish I played piano better. Simply put, I wish I would have studied more, practiced more, and ultimately learned more, but hopefully I have more than just a few years to continue to bone up and continue what I hope to be a continuing education in learning as much as I can before I get my ticket punched, however, at this point in my life, it seems the continuing pursuit of history and stories and psychology – the liberal arts – is where I’m firmly set, and it’s unlikely I’m going to be writing a paper with an emphasis on the mathematic principles of the multiverse theory with any lasting impact. Actually, it’s not going to happen. At least not in this universe.
The philosopher Gottfried Leibiniz coined something called the “Best of All Possible Worlds” theory, so if you subscribe to that kind of thing, everything is pretty much just as it should be. Or at least we’re living in the best case scenario. As depressing or joyous as that may be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_of_all_possible_worlds
It might have been possible that I could have been a math genius and unlocked the secrets of the universe, but according to Leibiniz, me just going on like this with seemingly no point in sight is better for the world. Or at least better than me unlocking the secrets of the universe.
Now throw in recent theories of parallel universes, string theory and such, and theoretically speaking, there might actually be another me on another earth that’s amazing at math that is indeed trying to figure out the secrets of the universe (mathematically, using science, rather than in a semi-coherent verbal ramble). However, since these other theories came after the “Best of All Worlds” theory, it’s also possible that there was another Leibiniz on some other earth saying that we’re actually living in the worst possible world.
Since the last time I’ve been in this particular space, so much has happened in this world – whether it’s one of many worlds or just the best we could do with this one – I didn’t really know where to begin. Much of it boggles the mind, really:
Bobbi Kristina Brown, Trump, Cosby, Jenner, China’s Stock Market Crash, Louisana Movie Theatre Shooting, and Detroit’s Satanic Statue were a few of the stories that were on Time’s e-mail blast just on Monday, not to mention the ongoing discussions about Iran, the 2016 Presidential Election, climate change and the other awful shootings that seem to be occurring far too often.
So there’s a lot to worry about and sometimes we wind up arguing about it and other times it just feels like it’s all getting worse and we’re all going mad in a mocuck, but on Sunday I read something that made me think that maybe things aren’t really that bad:
I don’t know why I’m so excited about this. I think it has something to do with all the talk about the United States sucking at math for the past forty-six years (it may not be forty-six years, but it’s at least as long as I can remember. Plus, as I’ve said, I suck at math).
Now this certainly doesn’t mean that a good bit of us don’t still suck at math. And it doesn’t make me any better at math, that’s for sure. And it doesn’t mean that our educational system still doesn’t need help in some places, but that a United States team is able to win something like this gives me some kind of hope that maybe things aren’t as completely terrible as some people say.
Sure, things upset us, frighten us, rattle our beliefs, shake our foundations and often, rather than solutions, our problems are met with a lot of noise and nonsense (check your Facebook feed). We long for simpler, better times. I hear so many people lamenting “it was better then…”. Some older folks, some my own age, even some people that are younger than me, fall back on this and this sentiment is largely perception, opinion and not knowing all the facts. Try watching the adventures of Heathcliff Huxtable now and see if pining about the “good old days” still rings as true.
Now rightfully, there’s a lot of anger out there and in some cases, the fear is understandable:
http://thebulletin.org/clock/2015
Disconcerting to say the least. And by the way, you’d think that we could get our shit together and try to buy at least a half hour or so on the Doomsday Clock instead of three measly minutes, right? And when I say “We”, I mean all of us – the whole planet.
Now, as devastated as we all were by the ugliness of that awful shooting in South Carolina, the Grace of AME Church in the aftermath, the swift action by the South Carolina government, the speech (and even singing) of our President, all genuinely moved me:
Seeing the compassion, courage and resilience humans can show in the face of such madness is encouraging. And we do see that resilience more often than not…
Now it goes without saying, as the news continues to show, the problems are far from solved, and sadly, the madness does continue. But that’s only because We, all of us, are capable of so much more and we should hold ourselves to a higher standard and continue to learn, and perhaps not be so set in our ways and be open to a higher education. And perhaps, like those math geniuses, we can solve some problems after we realize things probably weren’t necessarily any “better” then, today’s problems are just a little more complicated.
C I P R I A N I 
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