He never looked like the sort of person who would do analytic continuation on the factorial. But the new version? yes that is the man who did this.

I don’t know? this had a big impact on me. Maybe it is odd to look up portraits of the people who did things that interest you. But, I distinctly remember looking at the wrong image and being kind of annoyed that someone who did such unexpected things with math looked so boring— I thought he seemed like that kind of person who was good at everything. Pleasant at parties, well dressed, nice manners. How annoying.

The new one is somehow more comforting. I KNEW he wasn’t a normie!

@futurebird My uncle is a retired college math professor. He once told me that Euler is considered an oddball amongst famous mathematicians… because he seems to have been a rather well-adjusted member of society, with a stable family and everything!

(Said uncle, as a young man, once tried to stay awake for as long as he possibly could. Just because he wanted to. Luckily he passed out a bit short of the threshold for permanent brain damage.)

@futurebird I just went to look up Galois, expecting to find nothing (since he died aged 20), but there is indeed a portrait (aged 15) that looks like exactly the kind of troublemaker I expected him to be.

Évariste Galois - Wikipedia

(en.wikipedia.org)

@darkling

*hand pops up*
"I'm done!"

@darkling

The story about him being asked to sum all of the numbers from 1 to 1000 and finding a shortcut as a child is probably as fake as the one about George Washington and the cherry tree. But, I still like it and it is a part of Mathematics Culture, it's one of our parables that illustrates the values of the community.

So, I still tell it with that caveat and the hope that it will inspire young people to look for ways to avoid drudgery.

@darkling

I'm fascinated by Math Culture because math people tend to think it doesn't exist. All of the traditions, fables, superstitions, variations in language are totally invisible to many of them because obviously math is made of logic and culture is made of nonsense and so how could there be any such thing what are you talking about?

But, also these things can be the cause of a kind of gatekeeping but by talking about them and defining them as culture not logic that barrier may vanish.

@darkling

I once did an informal survey of regents exams marked by NYC math teachers. I was tasked with sorting several 100 word problems but I was curious if student handwriting had any impact on the subjective points that could be awarded for partial credit.

Specifically I suspected that students who wrote the letter "x" like a times symbol (eg not in cursive) were awarded fewer points than those who did (all else being equal.)

From my rough count of the points this seemed to be the case!

@darkling

When I pointed it out to the other graders, who really just wanted to go home one guy tried to justify this by saying that "anyone experienced in math wouldn't write x like that" which might be true but what came first? Why did it matter?

We re-scored the problems.

@futurebird @darkling I don't know, when I was in fourth or fifth grade I did that with 100. It just made sense to me that I could make 49 pairs that add to 100 (and the 100 itself as a 100), so 50 * 100. I did initially miss that 50 was left dangling, but that was swiftly corrected with a prodding question from my teacher.

@Azuaron @darkling

That's the biggest white lie in that story. That a teacher would give that task without wanting students to spot patterns and save time.

But it's more fun to pretend that the teacher was lazy.

There is nothing less logical than human beings who blind themselves to their own illogical behavior with the worship of logic itself. Math is just a linguistic system for trying to describe the world around us in greater detail than other systems might allow. The more logical thing to do would be to recognize ones vulnerability to illogical thought and embrace the parts of that, that are not damaging while trying to find in one's self the illogical beliefs that might be harmful (including the idea that one is capable of existing only in the logical) so one can allow themselves to improve. Denying that vulnerability in ones self only stunts people in a place where they cannot adapt to new/novel changes in information. It's how we end up with people that say facts don't care about your feelings, while ignoring the facts they don't like or don't support their argument, because the only facts that matter to somebody in that state are the ones they have assimilated into their world view. Math Culture exists and it's in my opinion what makes math a worthwhile pursuit. All math is, is an often inaccurate way of modelling the world, solar system, galaxy and universe around us. It is often capable of much more precision than other linguistical models, but in some areas I would say it's worse. But it reveals to us patterns we might not otherwise have recognized using other systems (This is why early math is so tied to art and philosophy and it would probably be a great thing if we stopped trying to create a dichotomy between math and art, it doesn't exist and both fields would be severely diminished without the existence of the other). Those patterns are often a thing of beauty and understanding them to a greater extent can open up a greater appreciation for the nature of life itself if we allow ourselves to appreciate the inherent art in math. Without that, math is just a toy for people who hate the world to escape into the cold logic that they can shape in their own image to reinforce their previously held beliefs... Like any linguistic system, but potentially worse. Stripping art and philosophy from math sucks. People who do that suck. It's actually one of the first things I can spot talking to tech bros that makes it obvious that eventually they are going to say something bigoted and small minded. Math is not a way to escape the world, but to get to know it better, people trying to shrink the world to make it less scary to them should be doing something else with their time instead of poisoning STEM with their small mindedness.

@futurebird A few weeks ago I read about the mathematician George Green being mistakenly associated with a photo of a wagon maker and USA civil war soldier, George Bernard Green ... how often do this mixups of portraits and photos of mathematicians happen?

ref: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/26375451.2025.2517491