HEFFNER: I am Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

I'm delighted to welcome Manil Suri to our broadcast today.

He's a distinguished mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the author of several acclaimed books, including The Big Bang of Numbers: How to Build the Universe Using Only Math.

Professor, what did you mean by that when you said, using only math?

SURI: Well, I'm really trying to come up with a theory of creation that just evolves from using mathematics.

And the reason for that is that if you look at such things, creation, our origins and so on, they're usually dealt by either religion or physics.

And these two, you know, these two disciplines kind of battle it out, get a lot of publicity, and I felt that hey, mathematicians need a little bit of that PR too.

So why not try to do this and see if we can break onto the cultural barrier.

HEFFNER: I understand what you mean, and think I understood what you meant in the sense of the origin of humanity that before there were disparate languages that could be understood, that there was a different language, the language of math and numbers.

And one thing that is still uniform today is if you visit most any foreign country and indigenous societies, there is the equivalent of this too.

The numbers are the numbers, right.

We all know numbers.

SURI: Right.

That's true.

But the question that then arises is that have, have human beings created numbers or do they exist in some independent form?

Much like Plato used to think that there's some realm somewhere out there where all the numbers are already formed, all mathematics is already formed, and we are just discovering these.

So that's one of the crucial things that I'm playing with here.

And actually the start of my book shows how you can build up numbers starting with nothing.

So perhaps there's some weird way that they actually built themselves up for all I know.

HEFFNER: And for our viewers and readers that you want to entice to access the full body of your book tell us a little bit more about that opening that you referred to.

SURI: So it happened when I was a undergraduate student way back in the 1970s.

And this was in Mumbai.

And my algebra professor, he gave us this very famous line by Kronecker that said, God created the integers and the rest all is the work of human beings.

And then he said that, and, and what that means is that, you know, these 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, they're God given, they're coming from heaven, and then you can create all of mathematics from it.

And then what he said is, Hey, I can do a little better than that.

I don't need God, I'm going to show you how to actually create all the numbers from something that's pretty much nothing.

It's called the empty set.

And he showed us this, he showed us this construction, and I guess it was the closest I've come to a religious experience.

Because suddenly the whole room was filled with numbers and the walls were disappearing, and, you know, there were all these numbers flying out, and that was a little like creation.

So years later, when I came to this idea of writing a book, I thought, hey, I need to start with that scene.

And I think the thrust of my book is to show that math is not about calculation.

It's not primarily about calculation.

It's really about ideas.

And that's a very tough barrier for most people to cross because they might not be good at calculation, and then they figure, hey, math is closed to me, so I'm trying to open it by showing how you can do math without calculations.

HEFFNER: What do you say to a person, and I'm not admitting this to be me, but those who know me would associate me with this person potentially, who did not make it past trigonometry to understand the ideas.

Literally, a math teacher once said to me, your brain is just not equipped to fire on these circuits.

It just works in a different way.

That being said, I got, A's in most of the humanities that I ever took, but it was a struggle for math.

And I want to access the ideas, but for some reason I had insufficient brain brainpower to do so.

SURI: I have to disagree with your teacher and perhaps with you as well that last statement that you made just in the sense that there's this mentality that comes with you do math, it's very difficult.

You fail at it, and then you take one of two paths.

Either you say, hey, I'm going to try again and keep doing it until I get it right.

Or you say, hey, my brain isn't equipped for this, and so that's why I'm going to phase this out.

And there's book's written about this, but it really comes down over many decades of teaching, I have seen people who would have exactly the same reaction as you did.

But I would say that if you give it enough time, and here's the key thing, if you have enough interest, you can do it.

And the main thing is the interest part.

Like, okay, people are happy to maybe see a 10 minute video on math, perhaps.

But if you are really interested enough then that's when you start doing other things, like reading books, reading articles, and if you take it at your own pace, I would think that you would be able to do them.

And by the way I can certify there is no trigonometry in my book, so you can't be afraid of that.

HEFFNER: Well, I was slow to the gun.

I made it through the requirements and I did take some statistical concepts in political science, which satisfied a requirement college.

I did the, the bare necessities which, gave me a bit of a foundation.

But I think that to your point about math representing ideas that is a brilliant and important notion.

And I think that if you were to tell the story of the humanity of math and how these ideas track with human development and our wellbeing in a practical application, what would be the most compelling instances from your book, or not from your book, that you would share with our audience?

SURI: So I actually teach a class that is four students in my college who have to take a math course and are not STEM majors.

So some of the things that we look at that are, again, through ideas looking at things like what's been really in the news recently are voting patterns where gerrymandering is a very mathematical kind of thing where can really get into that and see how that works.

So that's one of the topics I always talk about.

Another topic that I think is very essential is just with Artificial Intelligence.

What is going on?

How does that work?

And I can actually explain using very simple principles.

I'm not going to do that here, you need to take my class.

But you can really explain what it is that these algorithms do and how they can go completely out of whack.

So there's a whole bunch of things like that.

And when I teach this class, I really have a reading and we kind of take something from the headlines and then make a mathematical background or assessment of that.

So I think there are ways to bring this about for people in the humanities.

And I actually even taught a class with a English professor once, two humanities majors, and it was called math and what it means to be humans.

So there's again a lot of material there that you can interest people with.

HEFFNER: We often talk on the open mind about the aloofness or apathy as it relates to civic education.

Math is not the foremost ground that you consider when you talk about civic life, but our lives operate on numbers, literally our pulse, our heart rate, whether there is a percent of bacteria in a substance that we're consuming or air that we're breathing.

So math is the underlying unifying, fundamental foundational answer to almost every question.

SURI: Yeah.

HEFFNER: Especially when you are asking something where there is not gray area, there is real understanding, you either have possess a certain percentage of something or can account for a certain number of unknown substances in a tap or pond or lake or ocean.

So decisions are made and there's not the gray area.

So I wanted to ask you from this perspective, what are you most concerned about in the numbers of civil society?

SURI: That's an avalanche of things.

You've, you've mentioned quite a few of them.

Let me actually just give you one example cause there's just so many different things.

But you talked about how mathematics really affects our day-to-day life.

And one of the things I've been looking at recently, and I talk about in my classes is this idea of tests that we often do for health reasons.

This can be a screening for breast cancer, it can be a screening for all sorts of other things.

And these tests always have a false positive rate in the sense that they might indicate that you have something, even though you might not.

Now these tests are often, you often hear something like, hey, this test has a false positive rate of let's say 1%, which is pretty reasonable.

Or 2%.

And if you went to a doctor, and they've done they've done studies with this, you went to a doctor and you asked them, hey, someone tested positive for this test for a heart condition or whatever, and this test has a 1% false positive rate.

So what do you think the probability is that this person actually has that condition?

And a huge number, a huge percentage of doctors will say, well, it's 99% cause you subtract 1% from a hundred and you get 99.

And that's completely false.

The reason is that if these conditions are very rare, as many of them are, then the probability gets affected by that.

And so instead of a 99% chance that you have it, probable depending on the prevalency of the disease, it might only be like 1% or less than 1%.

So I'm just giving this as an example of how little things like that can actually create huge amounts of distress and effects in people's lives.

And of course there's that litany of other problems, climate change and population increases or decreases.

You can get lost in numbers.

The problem is also that numbers don't always reveal what the real situation is.

They can be manipulated, they can appear misleading, like this example of the test.

So you really do need to know some mathematics just to negotiate life.

HEFFNER: Fair.

And I appreciate you mentioning your concern about the manipulation of data and numerical data.

Is this something that has particularly concerned you over the course of this pandemic with the either pro or anti-vaccine stance and the way in which some of the data have been revealed?

One example that you might expound on is the risks associated with vaccination and that being manipulated and often exaggerated or exploited for political hay.

SURI: Yeah, and I think that's certainly one of them, the political side of manipulating data, but it's also the way that people interpret it.

And what happens is I have a very close relative who's in India, and she just keeps accumulating instances where she feels she's a rabid anti-vaxxer.

And so anyone who's had the vaccine and then gets COVID, that's immediately in her mind an instance of where the vaccine actually caused COVID.

Any little bits and scraps of information they get built into this kind of big engine, And out comes all sorts of justifications for why your own beliefs, how these things are just reinforcing your own beliefs.

So it's like a self-reinforcement process, and that's what I think is even more dangerous than people just manipulating things.

HEFFNER: I appreciate you mentioning that.

When it comes to the numbers related to wellbeing, numbers like salary or wage or, the extent to which you're covered by health insurance, so deductible.

These are all numbers also that in some equate to life and death and are meaningful in projecting the trajectory of human life.

What do you think of those numbers, the numbers of a living wage, the numbers of a deductible for an insurance?

Do you often think about numbers like that too?

SURI: Yes, absolutely.

And there are, again, various little things that are mixed in.

For example, my husband is retired, and he was paying a certain amount of money for his Social Security and his Medicare, and for his Medicare, I mean.

And we decided to get married and suddenly the amount changed drastically.

And it was something that even I hadn't anticipated just because your spouse's income is also calculated into how much you pay for Medicare.

So there are so many little things like that that are rather opaque.

And what you're actually talking about is, I think, more what are the basic numbers that we need to survive to exist, like minimum wage and so on.

And that's actually one of the examples we do in our class because we look at taxation.

Taxation for example is not a straight line.

It has, it has some curvature built in so that if you have a higher income, you're supposed to pay more taxes.

And of course, that doesn't happen.

There's several ways of fixing that.

But the most important thing I suspect is the inheritance tax, the debt taxes, because that's the way a lot of wealth doesn't get into the system.

One of the exercises we do in my class there is to have the students actually come up with a budget and say how much they're going to tax each person, how much they're going to tax each income, and see if they can come up with an amount of tax that'll actually run everything.

And the very interesting thing is I always ask them, well, what should be the level at which you're not taxed?

You know, there should be some slab.

Incomes below this, you shouldn't have to pay any tax.

And it's always interesting to see what a wide range of answers there are.

Some people say, absolutely, there should be one 10% tax on everything.

Some people say, hey, you should have a very large amount that you don't tax.

So students are also mixed.

And people's views on these topics are of course very divergent, even at the student level.

HEFFNER: And of course, there are those sticky numbers of our national debt and deficit, and sometimes people confuse debt and deficit, and I would much rather hear your explanation of debt and deficit than a politician's or any lay person.

But those are numbers that I'm interested in your perspective on, too, especially since we haven't been in the green in this country since the 90s, or very early 2000s.

And that is, if the government were a household, it would be non-existent.

That is a concern.

SURI: That that is an absolute concern.

Just in terms of the total deficit, the total debt that the government has taken on in terms of borrowing money to be able to actually complete its task and then paying interest on that mounting up.

The number that really worries me related to that is the fact that what's happening with our demographics, and this has already happened in many countries where populations age and they typically have an hourglass kind of shape where they have a very young population.

These people are actively contributing to the economy, they're getting jobs, paying taxes, and then as the population, as prosperity increases, the birth rate usually declines.

And that's happening in the U.S.

It's happened already in, in very severe forms in other countries like Japan, for instance.

And with that, you find that there is more money needed for all the older people there who need all this care.

And also there isn't that much money coming in in terms of taxes because young people who aren't necessarily getting jobs.

We are seeing that in the university level because there was a Baby Boomer surge and then their kids went through and now the rate of new kids who would be college-going age is really going to decline.

So at the educational level, we are going to see, a lot of change in terms of which universities remain open.

So there are all these processes that are out there that are working.

HEFFNER: So fewer enrollees fewer students in American colleges is already trending.

This is more of a philosophical than a mathematical question, but do you hear both perspectives that we are a smug and self-satisfied culture, and therefore we don't want to have children because we are satisfied with the modern-day gadgets and gizmos in Chat GPT?

The former formerly social conservative guard, or at least as it had been described, would explain the decline in birth rate as the degradation of moral values or human values.

And I think a lot of the liberal cohort or folks who are interested in compassionate outcomes would say the decline in life expectancy in the U.S., our longevity, the decline in social mobility, the fact that in the 50s or the 70s or the 90s or even the early 2000s, you might work one job and be able to put two kids through college, not today.

So there are these two schools of thinking historically, and there are many schools of thinking about what explains the declining birth rate.

Do you come out strongly on one fence versus the other?

SURI: I think I would definitely go for the more economics-related reasons.

The second one that you said, and I've seen that certainly in India.

It's very stark.

And in China as well, I suspect, where originally there were these large families, especially when it was an agrarian economy.

You needed a lot of farm hands.

You had people, kids who would die off because of disease.

Now, as standards of living have increased and things are more in the cities, people who are more prosperous would only have maybe one or two kids, especially since it's so expensive, having kids is extremely expensive.

And I think that's common in this country too, in the U.S. as well, that you would really have to think twice before you have a kid, HEFFNER: I think, many times over.

I just did a double take.

I thought the, the children were out there.

SURI: Oh.

HEFFNER: I kid, I kid.

I hear what you're saying.

I recently interviewed the governor of Massachusetts, Governor Maura Healey, and she does not have children.

And I likewise do not have children.

And I asked her if the declining numbers in our lives, the wellbeing, you can't be insured even the way that you once were in this country which we recently discussed with M.T.

Connolly, the author of a book on aging.

But everything seems to be cutting in that direction of more efficiency and less humanity.

And so is there a way that we a greater sense of the numbers we have to restore?

I think that any political convention or any debate ought to strive for those numbers, and that's why I think you went from the discussion of a minimum wage to a living wage, because the science of it and what number would guarantee that you are not in a condition of hunger or squalor you know, that that really matters, the difference between qualifying it as a living wage versus a minimum wage, which might mean that you're in poverty and you make the minimum wage.

So have you seen any movement from your colleagues across disciplines, specifically in thinking about the future of American democracy and government and global society too, of saying, basically these numbers have to be the guardrails of what we promote for the wellbeing of society?

I don't see that coming out of the mouths of politicians or political scientists or thinkers who say our foundation has to be shaped by a a certain standard for numbers.

And I get that it's hard to do that because what is livable today is not livable tomorrow necessarily.

SURI: I'm always torn on these questions just in the sense that you can hope for a lot of things.

You can campaign for a lot of things, but eventually there are some you know, there is some sort of equilibrium that you're going to come to.

People who, as I said, people in my classes who are more on the right versus those who are on the left.

And so I think one thing that we can all agree on, perhaps, is that having kids, we said is going to be more and more precious.

And so what can we do in terms of making their lives more fulfilled?

What can we do in terms of at least intellectually that each kid has a good chance in terms of succeeding in what's going to come.

And just being in being in the education business, I feel that that's one of the key things.

Certainly there are things that we all want in terms of these numbers, in terms of wages and you know, social kind of nets and so on.

But I want to go further and say, what are we doing for kids who are in schools, kids who are in very dire kind of financial areas.

How are we making sure that they actually get access to mathematics, for instance?

And the struggle there is extremely bleak.

In some ways it's very difficult.

And so that's where I feel that we should also be paying attention.

The number of kids that we have might be declining, but what are we doing for even the ones that we have?

HEFFNER: Manil Suri, author of the Big Bang of Numbers: How to Build the Universe Using Only Math.

Thank you so much for your insight today, professor.

SURI: Thank you.

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