In the first video I ever watched of Stanford mathematics professor Tadashi Tokieda, he compared his career in math to falling in love. He realized the subject was meant for him and not chosen by him when he thought about math while filling out his taxes and doing the laundry. Tokieda’s anecdote reveals the instinctual nature of math in everyday life — rather than something disconnected from the world around us, math is innate.
Math and science appear to be reserved for the elite few. Any physics or math major can tell you about how many compliments they’ve received just by expressing intent to major or passion for it. Both of these sciences are rarely applied in the typical person’s life, which causes them become somewhat isolated from the general population.
As a result of its perceived difficulty, math becomes a subject that is regarded as “not for everyone.” Understanding math, then, is regarded as exclusive and rare — and, thus, a subject of pride. It feels good to know things that others don’t, and working hard to obtain said knowledge is not easy, especially in academia.
One of the first concepts taught in economics is the law of supply: when a good’s supply increases, its price decreases. The same goes for knowledge and skills. While dividing numbers and boiling eggs are great skills to have, they have very little value because practically everyone can do it. Calculating the singular value decomposition and cooking peking duck however, carry much more value because of the scarcity of the skill. Applying that lane of logic to school, it simply doesn’t make sense to teach. Investing one’s time to essentially reduce the value of a skill that they worked hard to earn is not economically rational, unless teaching is the highest paying opportunity available by far.
Tokieda throws these false notions out the window. He does this through simple tools he calls “toys.” To Tokieda, toys are ordinary objects that behave in surprising ways, challenging preconceived notions of the universe. With them, he confuses those watching and lets the audience discover an exception to the expected behavior of a familiar object, in a way that is accessible to people at every level of mathematics.
Take a cylinder filled to a certain level with rice. In his lecture, Tokieda asks the audience to raise their hands if they think it will roll down an incline faster, slower, or at the same pace as a cylinder with no rice, cracking jokes and giving validity to each hypothesis by offering rough explanations of the logic behind them. Then, he lets go of the cylinder, and to everyone’s surprise, it doesn’t move at all. He jumps into an explanation of why and how, and by using household items to explain the complexities of rotational granular physics, Tokieda makes a niche and sheltered topic free to understand. It was taken for granted by the audience that a cylindrical object should roll down a hill, but when Tokieda challenges this assumption, he connects the audience with the wonder of the universe through math.
What Tokieda values in education and math is not simply replicating proofs and learning facts. He values critical thinking, discovery through observation and questioning of your surroundings. These skills possess a much lower barrier of entry than, for example, granular physics, but are often just as elusive. By mixing math with life and humanity, Tokieda brings the subject down to an approachable level. His destruction of barriers and emphasis on sharing knowledge and skills makes Tokieda such a shining example of an educator.
Tokieda’s lectures dispel the false dichotomy between the arts and the sciences. He reminds us that exploration and reasoning, especially through the lens of math, are for everyone, not just students and mathematicians. His lectures inspire people to go out and discover new ideas in unexpected places, and the mundane nature of the toys used in his lectures are especially conducive to home discovery.
Unfortunately, not everyone has the privilege of Tokieda as their lecturer. While his videos can be found online, a professor like him is one in a million. What can we do if we do not have access to such a professor?
In the spirit of self-discovery, we must learn what Tokieda teaches, even if he is not here to teach us. Unassisted critical thinking and discovery is the ultimate lesson that Tokieda imparts on his students. The most important lesson Tokieda imparts is to find the curiosities and surprises in our own lives — and you don’t need to take linear algebra to learn that.
Contact Dylan Qu at qud@oxy.edu
