Did you ever discover a treasure hidden right under your nose or in plain sight? An arrowhead you had stepped over a hundred times, a love letter written when your dearly departed parents were dating, waiting in an old shoebox for you to find it, or a dusty book with an unattractive cover, filled with priceless knowledge?
I found such a treasure while sorting and gleaning boxes of memorabilia taken from my childhood home. It was a book I remember gathering dust on the bookshelf in our den. It has a title sure to repel any sophisticated and worldly teenager: “Mathematics for the Million.”
Math played a large role in my academic pursuits, though my abilities have admittedly atrophied . Like most of us who still use math at all, my synapses were reconditioned to handle spreadsheets and software. Still, I always loved geometry, which was my only hope as an adult clawing my untrained way toward understanding the basic procedures that are second nature to any professional carpenter.
So before I added the book to the donation pile, I cracked it open and flipped over to the first chapter. A passage caught my eye and I was hooked. I read, “…no society is safe in the hands of its clever people.”
The book was written in 1937 by Lancelot Hogben, who was a British medical statistician and experimental zoologist. He was what we once called a “Renaissance Man” back when we could call a man such without offending anyone. Today we might refer to him as a polymath, at the risk of offending Polly.
Professor Hogben expands on the purposes of his book in that first chapter, “Mathematics, the Mirror of Civilization.” He writes, “Today the lives and happiness of people depend more than most of us realize on the correct interpretation of public statistics which are kept by government offices.”
He continues with a historical perspctive on math before diving into the basics, and then takes the reader on a journey from geometry to trigonometry, through calculus, logarithims and statistics, with practical applications for each discipline.
As much as I enjoyed the book, two things trouble me about it. First, that it was written in 1937. It was written for the benefit of the “average” citizen at the time, “for the million.” The book is over 600 pages. The contents would today be considered college if not graduate level material.
The second thing that troubles me about the book – is that it was written in 1937. Long before the internet, when information was not tightly controlled by a handful of corporate entities, when public trust in government and all the institutions that enable a society to function, indeed, when trust in one’s fellow citizens was much higher than it is today – Professor Hogben was concerned that the citizen was ill prepared to discern fact from fiction, truth from propaganda.
What hope do we have today, when a popular book written 85 years ago would be beyond the abilities of all but the most advanced students, when the study of math is actually discouraged by some, even by those positioned to decide the curriculum for a large number of students? It’s not just the math. Every smartphone can perform in an instant any calculation found in Professor Hogben’s book. What’s missing is the ability to reason, to evaluate, to discern. What’s missing is the tools of logic essential for separating fact from interpretation.
We’re not going to acquire those tools by picking the websites and social media networks that agree the most with our preconceived notions and cognitive biases. Unfortunately that is how most of us find the information we need to navigate the world.
Outside The Box 