On the Subject of Being Different
Cross posted at Engineering Education.

I was a student attending the prestigious Math Olympiad Summer Program (MOSP) during the summer of 1993 when it was announced that mathematician Andrew Wiles was believed to have solved the most famous unsolved theorem in all of mathematics. Unfortunately, for me, the post-proof hype turned to gloom. Wiles said something that I now regard as one of the most unfortunate and wrong statements ever made by a man at the top of the world of math and science. He said that the days of the non-professional, non-academic mathematician were over. He said, in so many words, that nothing particularly interesting and new would be discovered by anyone working outside an academic institution.



I remember being mocked by my peers for disagreeing. Of course, I must be completely loony to disagree with the greatest living mathematician! For the rest of the program, I kept to myself almost exclusively, and upon returning home, I stopped studying mathematics. Though I qualified as one of the 24 students to be invited for a third straight year, I declined the invitation to MOSP my junior year. The following year I wound up a fraction of a question, almost surely the result of a hole in my training, from earning a spot on the U.S. team to compete at the International Mathematical Olympiad. Had I made the team, I would have worked very hard not to embarrass myself at the event. I would have wanted a gold medal. It might have reignited my love for mathematics.

I have no regrets. I will do more for mathematics as an educator than I would have done for it as an academic. I am not a personality that belongs in a university setting.

And it's best that we live in a world in which a diversity of personalities make different decisions.


A Different Scientist

Recently I began conducting a series of interviews that I plan to begin posting soon. Unfortunately, none are yet finished, but recently I began one with a now famous physicist named Garrett Lisi, whom I met a few times in San Diego, including at his own going away party just before he and his girlfriend took their converted van-home to Maui. So far, we're only one question into the interview, but I'm excited because he already said something that I find very important for students to read. I won't give it away yet...

Lisi, whom I found friendly and inviting in person, is getting attention in the physics world for publishing a "Theory of Everything" (a step up even from "Grand Unified Theory"), which relies on a surprisingly simple (this is a relative term of course) mathematical structure to explain the universe (in direct competition with string theory). There is a recent article in the New Yorker about it. Take a look at this excerpt:

Lisi had long harbored a deep skepticism about string theory. As a graduate student in theoretical physics at U.C. San Diego in the nineties, he was briefed on a recent string-theory development called the Maldacena conjecture by a young member of the physics department. “It was very interesting mathematics,” Lisi said. “But I remember walking out of this office and wondering what it had to do with any physical reality. And, as far as I could tell, it didn’t.” The influence of string theorists was growing at the time, and Lisi felt the academy closing in on him. “If you share an office next to a guy for twenty years, and you like him and you’re friends with him, it’s hard to tell him that you think that his whole idea of how the universe works is completely wrong,” he said. String theory, Lisi had come to believe, was “a mess.”

The article goes on:

Lisi didn’t think that he would ever return to academic physics. “It’s publish or perish, and I figured I was perishing,” he said. He became accustomed to working in isolation, in air-conditioned public libraries, or in spare rooms at home, when he had a home. There were times when he lived in mansions near Colorado ski slopes, house-sitting. At other times, he pitched a tent in a friend’s back yard. He always figured, he told me, “that my brain wouldn’t let me starve.” But he was hardly thriving.

Lisi’s working life was not steady, or easy. “Ninety-five per cent of my time is virtually wasted,” he said. “If I were in a university, one of my colleagues would say, ‘No, that direction makes no sense—other people have looked into it, and it doesn’t go anywhere.’ Here no one stops me.” He spent weeks searching for a reliable place to work, and months on projects he later discarded. Sometimes he felt like a crazy person, walking down the pier in Santa Monica and muttering equations out loud.

I think part of the reason why I'm rooting for Lisi's theory is Lisi. This article tells a really important facet of Lisi's story -- that he's not a conventional physicist. This is important on so many levels. Science includes a lot of things, including boring day-to-day experiments, looking for the 309th application of a certain well-known phenomenon, and the slow decay of politics. But first and foremost, science moves forward because of ideas that break that mold. And Garrett Lisi, as a human being, breaks the mold.

Edit: I removed "[in]famous" in favor of "famous" because I think few people will understand that I'm mocking people who bashed Lisi's TOE before a complete review and giving Lisi (and others) a chance to work through the kinks.