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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Last week, New York City’s Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT) took place—a single exam with the power to determine entry into the city’s most prestigious high schools. For years, this test has sparked fierce debate: is it an equalizer, giving all students a shot at academic excellence, or a gate that keeps out minority students and prevents equity? With Black and Latino students making up 68% of NYC’s public school population but only about 10% of those admitted to specialized high schools, many see the SHSAT as a symbol of the system’s failures.
Making good decisions isn’t easy, especially when it’s hard to know what information to trust. In an ideal world, we could trust the information we hear from friends and from the news. But the media likes to cover the rare and shocking, not the common and routine. A plane crash halfway around the world (a highly uncommon occurance) can seem as likely as a car accident down the street. This distortion skews our perspective, creating a big gap between what we think is likely and what actually is.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a smart way of knowing what really matters—he calls it “Skin in the Game.” In his book by the same name, Taleb explains that people with something at stake usually offer the best information. It’s simple: when you stand to lose, you’re going to think carefully. But when you’re insulated from the consequences, it’s easy to toss around advice or make bold predictions because they sound good, not because they’re giong to work.
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