Ben Orlin — Math As Universal Language (EP.232)

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Sep 5, 2024

Ben Orlin, a math educator and creator behind 'Math With Bad Drawings,' discusses reframing math as a language. He shares insights on how math relates to everyday life, using playful analogies with fantasy towns and hilarious anecdotes about counting in Welsh. Delving into the relationship between math and intuition, he highlights biases in statistical reasoning and the influence of language on understanding numbers. Their discussion also touches on the philosophical connections between math and music, inviting listeners to see math through a fun lens.

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INSIGHT

Base Rates and Human Intuition

Humans struggle with base rates because we're drawn to details and social assumptions.
Math often requires disregarding certain knowledge during calculations.

ANECDOTE

Sampling and Prior Knowledge

A student struggled to apply statistical sampling to a boba tea scenario due to prior knowledge.
An example involving an unknown animal helped her grasp the concept.

ADVICE

Self-Selected Samples

Be wary of self-selected samples, like in "The Millionaire Next Door".
They offer biased views, unlike random samples.

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As a former quant with six grandkids, my spidey-senses started tingling as soon as I heard about Ben Orlin's mission to make math fun.

A native of St.Paul, Ben is a math educator and popularizer who is known for his "Math With Bad Drawing" blog and book series. Today's conversation revolves around his excellent, original new book Math for English Majors: A Human Take on the Universal Language, which reframes math as a language, complete with nouns, verbs and grammar.

Like any mathematician worth his salt, Ben loves games, which he sees as 'puzzle engines'. No wonder then that our conversation meandered and unfolded like a satisfying puzzle, touching upon rich concepts. We discussed making sense of sampling through fantasy towns where 70% of inhabitants are lawyers (not a town I'd like to be in), threw in a bit of Lewis Carroll to discuss the assumptions built into propositional logic (sometimes it really is turtles all the way down) and pitied the Welsh kids learning how to count (keep listening to know what that means).

I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did! For more thoughts on the episode, the full transcript, and bucketloads of other stuff designed to make you go; "Hmm, that's interesting!" check out our Substack.

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Show Notes:

A Mathematician's Obsession
The Language of Algebra
What the Tortoise Said to Achilles
The Concrete and the Abstract
Games As Puzzle Engines
We're not Built to Understand Base Rates
Why We Always Think About Samples Incorrectly
Randomness and Wikipedia Rabbit-holing
Counting in Different Languages
The Concept of Zero
Negatives as the Mathematical Language of Opposites
Mathematical Escape Rooms
Why Is the World Comprehensible?
Discussing Infinity on Infinite Loops
The Deep Mathematics of Music
Ben As Emperor of the World

Books Mentioned:

Math for English Majors: A Human Take on the Universal Language; by Ben Orlin
Math with Bad Drawings: Illuminating the Ideas That Shape Our Reality; by Ben Orlin
Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea; by Charles Seife
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid; by Douglas Hofstadter
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain; by Oliver Sacks