For many nerds like me, The Big Bang Theory felt like more than just a TV show — it felt like validation. Unlike countless other sitcoms where nerdy characters were relegated to sidekicks or punchlines, this series placed them firmly at the center. It celebrated the quirks and passions that define nerd culture: an unabashed love of sci-fi, comic books, and video games, alongside the social awkwardness and intellectual curiosity that often accompany them. This wasn’t a world where debates about Star Wars continuity or the ethics of time travel were niche obsessions — here, they became full-fledged storylines.
Author: Robert Schlaff
If a nerd is someone whose every word and deed are predicated on the belief that appearing smart is more important than getting laid, then They Might Be Giants are, in fact, nerds: their music doesn’t sell sex; it sells smart-kid whimsy. Arty, melodic, and well wrought in a formal way, it bristles with wordplay and musical ideas. — Azerrad, Michael. “Urban Legends.” The New Yorker, August 12, 2002.
Friday night, Ari and I went with my high school friend Michelle and her husband to the They Might Be Giants concert at Kings Theater. It was an awesome experience, seeing so many middle-aged nerds getting together to celebrate the original nerd rock band. It’s like everyone took a night away from their crossword puzzles and board games to belt out songs about the capital of Turkey.
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A Year of Living Mindfully
Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t look around once in a while, you could miss it. — Ferris Bueller.
There’s so much going on. My kids are growing up so fast, and I’m desperately trying to keep up with the whirlwind of changes in the world, especially with AI. Like many people, I feel this constant temptation to do more, more, more—thinking that if I can just be a little more productive, I can get ahead of all of this change and find happiness.
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The Power of the Written Word
I’m pissed. Bestselling nonfiction books have been lying to me. I know I shouldn’t care so much about this, but these books hold an odd level of cachet in our world. Books like those by Steven Levitt (Freakonomics) or Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers) have ideas that I used to take seriously. But seem to go viral throughout culture, shaping the way we think and talk about the world.
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Yale Needs Women
This year, Yale honored Constance L. Royster ’72, the second Black woman to receive the Yale Medal (as far as I can tell), the university’s highest alumni honor. Ms. Royster was celebrated for her extraordinary contributions to Yale—her dedication, her advocacy, and her unwavering commitment to building a stronger, more inclusive community.
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Befriending My Inner Venom
I recently watched the movie Venom and couldn’t help but notice the fascinating psychological dynamic at play—Venom embodies Eddie’s selfish inner self—in Freud’s words, his id. On the surface, it’s a story about a guy being consumed by an alien symbiote. But beneath the humor and the high-octane action lies a deeper exploration of human nature. Venom isn’t just an alien parasite; he’s a metaphor for the inner selfishness inside us—the raw, untamed instincts that often feel unwelcome but are undeniably part of who we are.
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Why ChatGPT Didn’t Brush Its Teeth
As much as we’d like to believe we’re guided by pure logic, the truth is far messier: we’re not rational beings; we’re rationalizing beings. Our decisions aren’t always born of reason but are often retroactively dressed up in it. We make choices based on feelings, impulses, or half-formed desires, and then we craft stories to make those choices seem deliberate. It’s not dishonesty; it’s our mind’s way of stitching together coherence from chaos. And that’s okay. The goal isn’t to stop this process—it’s part of what makes us human. But when we pause to question our justifications, we open the door to understanding ourselves better: what we value, what we fear, and who we’re striving to become.
This tendency isn’t just a quirk of adulthood—it’s alive and well in kids, too, though with far less polish.
If there’s one thing I learned in high school, it’s that math was created by white men. Or at least, that’s how it seemed at the time. Names like Pythagoras, Pascal, and Fibonacci loomed large in my textbooks as if they had singlehandedly invented the building blocks of mathematics. No mention of where these ideas actually came from or the long, complex history behind them—just the neat, tidy story of how white men had supposedly figured it all out.
Take the Fibonacci sequence. I remember being fascinated by its elegance: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…
Each number builds on the two before it, showing up in nature from sunflower spirals to the curves of seashells. It felt almost magical.
And it was all thanks to this Italian mathematician, Leonardo Fibonacci—or so I was told.
But here’s the thing: Fibonacci didn’t invent it. By the time he wrote about the sequence in Liber Abaci, it was already centuries old.
Uncovering the True Origins of Mathematical Ideas
By the time Fibonacci wrote about the sequence, it had already been described in ancient India. Around 200 BCE, Indian mathematicians like Pingala were using it to analyze patterns in Sanskrit poetry. Later, Virahanka and Hemachandra expanded on it, applying it to combinatorics and other mathematical problems.
This wasn’t just a random observation—it was part of a rich and evolving tradition of mathematical thought.
So how did Fibonacci’s name get attached to it? The answer, as is often the case, is timing. Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci wasn’t just about the sequence; it was an introduction to the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, which he encountered during his travels in North Africa. By bringing these ideas to Europe, Fibonacci made them accessible to a new audience, and in the process, his name became forever linked to a concept he didn’t create.
I don’t blame Fibonacci for this—he wasn’t trying to take credit for the work of others. But the fact that his name stuck, while the names of Pingala, Virahanka, and Hemachandra faded into obscurity, says a lot about how credit is distributed in history.
It’s not just about who made the discovery—it’s about who told the story.
Reclaiming the Stories of Forgotten Pioneers
If we’re serious about recognizing the true pioneers of mathematics, we should go beyond just retelling their stories—we should honor them in the way we name the concepts they created. Imagine learning about the Pingala Sequence instead of the Fibonacci sequence, or studying Yang Hui’s Triangle in place of Pascal’s.
These small but significant changes would give overdue credit to the mathematicians who first discovered these ideas:
• Rename the Pythagorean Theorem to Baudhayana’s Theorem, after the Indian scholar Baudhayana.
• Replace Newton’s Binomial Theorem with Khayyam’s Binomial Expansion, in honor of Persian mathematician Omar Khayyam.
• Honor Brahmagupta’s Formula instead of Heron’s Formula for the area of a triangle.
These aren’t just symbolic changes—they’re a way to correct the historical record and emphasize the global nature of human innovation.
Renaming isn’t about erasing anyone from history. It’s about restoring balance to a narrative that has long skewed toward a select few. By doing so, we open up new ways for students and scholars alike to see mathematics not as the work of a single culture, but as a shared achievement that connects us all.
The Power of a Fuller History
Books like The Secret Lives of Numbers: A Hidden History of Math’s Unsung Trailblazers by Kate Kitagawa and Timothy Revell shed light on these overlooked contributions. The book dives into the rich, multicultural origins of mathematics, unearthing stories of mathematicians who were pushed to the margins of history.
It highlights figures like Pingala and Al-Khwarizmi, whose work laid the foundation for much of what we take for granted in modern math, and explores how cultural biases have shaped the way these achievements are remembered—or forgotten.
What’s powerful about The Secret Lives of Numbers is how it reframes math not as a series of isolated discoveries, but as a deeply interconnected, global endeavor. The book doesn’t shy away from the uncomfortable truth that many of the mathematical ideas we associate with Western figures had roots elsewhere.
It’s a reminder that restoring these stories isn’t just about fairness—it’s about painting a fuller, richer picture of the world we live in.
A Shared Legacy
The next time someone gushes about the Fibonacci sequence, I hope they think of Pingala. It’s a reminder of just how rich and interconnected the history of math really is. Math doesn’t belong to one culture or one group of people—it belongs to all of us. And its history deserves to reflect that.
The Fibonacci sequence is beautiful. But for me, it’s even more beautiful when I know the whole story.
ChatGPT writing note: I left the final edit to ChatGPT on this one. I think it did a pretty good job!
On November 14, 2024, The Onion announced a move that felt straight out of its own pages: it acquired Infowars, during a bankruptcy auction. This surprising twist came after Infowars’ downfall following defamation lawsuits won by families of the Sandy Hook victims. The Onion plans to relaunch Infowars in January 2025 as a parody site—a poetic, and perhaps ironic, reclamation of a space once dominated by misinformation.
Today we went to see & Juliet. I didn’t know much about it beforehand, only that it was supposed to be good for familes, so it seemed like a good choice for an outing with the kids. A couple of days ago, though, I found out it was a jukebox musical—a genre that pulls its soundtrack from popular songs rather than creating original compositions for the show. Think Mamma Mia! or Moulin Rouge, stories told through songs you likely already know. When I realized this, I knew I’d need to adjust my expectations.
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