Terence TaoJul 19, 2023

A small anecdote in relation to a recent coffee conversation I had with @TaliaRinger (which they relate over at https://twitter.com/TaliaRinger/status/1681410191278080000 ): Yesterday I spoke with a children's book author who was interviewing me as part of a series she was writing on contemporary scientists. She freely admitted that she did not have great experiences with her math education at an under-resourced school and chose very early on to focus on writing instead. Nevertheless we had an excellent conversation about many mathematical topics that she was not previously familiar with, such as proof by contradiction, Cartesian coordinates, Mobius strips, or compressed sensing, all of which she found fascinating (and said she would read up on more of these topics herself after our interview). I posed to her the isoperimetric problem (using the classic story of Queen Dido from the Aeneid as the intro) and she correctly guessed the correct shape to maximize area enclosed by a loop (a circle), and instantly grasped the analogy between this problem and the familiar fact that inflated balloons are roughly spherical in shape. I am certain that had her path turned out differently, she could have attained far greater levels of mathematical education than she ended up receiving.

This is not to say that all humans have an identical capability for understanding mathematics, but I do strongly believe that that capability is often far higher than is actually manifested through one's education and development. Sometimes the key thing that is missing is a suitable cognitive framework that a given person needs to align mathematical concepts to their own particular mental strengths.

Talia Ringer on Twitter

“Terry Tao and I spoke over coffee for like two hours yesterday, in part about diversity in how people think about math. We both agreed that people who hit these walls early mostly don't learn the way of thinking about math that works for them. It's an educational failure”

Twitter
Show threadblake shaw 🇵🇸Jul 19, 2023

@tao @TaliaRinger i hated mathematics in K-12, but wound up discovering a love for it during an undergrad introduction to set theory, where I was introduced to mathematics as a practice of reasoning rather than application of rules introduced via rote memorization.

I was also diagnosed with ADHD as a kid, which I think is more of a disfunction with following instructions rather than an incapacity to maintain attention, because when left to my own devices to study a subject I can make great progress, but when asked to do something according to some prescription I often have trouble, and many friends I know who were ADHD as kids and then did great in university expressed similar experiences.

The problem is that most people's ADHD prevents them from going to a decent university because their grades are so badly effected. I was very lucky that my school district started a high school for self-learners that they sent to for high school, and graduated early with near perfect GPA

Show threadTalia RingerJul 19, 2023

@rml I also have ADHD! At some point I learned to embrace the way my brain works rather than fight it, and it made a huge difference for me. The flipside to impulsiveness is fearlessness; the flipside to distraction is exploration. And I don't know if you experience hyperfocus, but while it can be harmful if it's on a video game or something, it can be great when it's on research.

I really strongly believe that ADHD brains are beautiful. I still struggle a lot with paperwork, chores, and so on, but that's OK, my neurotypical partner helps out. I struggle with details in research, and my collaborators help out, or I outsource those details to trustworthy computation. 😄

Show threadTalia Ringer

@rml With ADHD I've also found the impact of interest on how well I do on something to be strongly amplified. My ADHD Coach called it an "interest-based nervous system" and I really like that. For me this often meant that I could not motivate myself enough to care about introductory courses and would find them very hard, but I'd get obsessed with later more "advanced" topics and I'd excel at them.

My intro CS lecturer in college told everyone that if you get a B in intro CS, you'll likely get a C in the second class and then fail the third, so you should just consider dropping the major. I had a B in intro CS and when I heard that, it almost stopped me from pursuing it further. But I excelled so much once I started to have freedom in what particular parts of CS I could explore. Like cryptology, programming languages, and complexity theory. It just kept getting more fun. CS research feels like the epitome of that. I can work on the things that captivate my interest at any given point, and somehow that's an actual job I can get paid for. Cool!!

Jul 19, 2023 at 4:35pmWeb
Show threadblake shaw 🇵🇸Jul 19, 2023

@TaliaRinger exactly! I think ADHD is much more about hyperfocus than it is about being unable to focus; its simply diagnosed as a deficit because it manifests as a behavioural disorder in the class room.

everyone I've known who was diagnosed with ADHD as a kid and has wound up doing well shares a propensity towards becoming obsessively involved in their work, focusing on it all hours of the working day, and those I know from growing up who went to community college etc (because society failed them) have wound up with drug & alcohol problems. if you give people with ADHD something we can sink our teeth into, we honestly don't need adderall. and I think that goes to show that diagnosing it as an "attention deficit" is part of the problem.

Show threadAndrew PerforsJul 19, 2023
@rml @TaliaRinger As a fellow ADHDer, I completely agree with this entire conversation :)