Credit where credit is due. This blog post is inspired by the following:
What is the role of mathematics in the world? Do we do math to do good? Or do we do math to make a lot of money using pieces of paper that say that we're smart? Where, amongst the calculus, the differential equations, the algebra, and the quasi-complex pseudo-Cartan Hodge structures on conformal varietes, does the matimatical community find meaning?
Surely, math is the universal language. We study math because of a deep love for the True Secrets of the Universe. Everything, when you zoom in enough, becomes math. We, as mathematicians, have a knack for throwing new machines at old problems, and revolutionizing the way we think about the world around us.
God created the integers. Everything else was done by mathematicians.
In the last month, the world has encountered a problem. It's a problem that we've seen many times in the history of humanity. Only this time, it's different! This time, we've got game theory! This time, we've got the SIR model! This time, we've got fancy computers that spit out "FATAL ERROR" and "hbox overfull badness 10000" when we ask them questions! This time, we've got the power of 1200 math PhD's per year working on this. Maybe if we all worked together, we could create a metric, standard, or model that would unify everything we know! It would be used by everyone, and we'd all save the world!
Maybe not. Maybe we're crowding the field with bullshit. Maybe we're overstepping our expertise. My friends and collegues are very good at computing cohomology, and some are very smart! My friends can learn anything they set their minds to, but so far, very few of my friends have set their minds to epidimiology. Some of them didn't even notice that I misspelled it.
We all want to help. I want to help. It's hard for me to think about all of the math I know, and not use it to help. I thought about what I can do to help, and realized that my role in this pandemic is to
To me, this means taking the following pledge:
Join me?