Math Problem

Several years ago, I was at a birthday dinner at a sushi bar and I sat next to a woman who was an artist, but she confessed that what she had always really wanted was to be a mathematician. I pressed her for details because I don’t understand math you don’t do at restaurants. And I’m glad I did because she then told me the story of her professor’s math problem, which I have thought about every day since:

This woman had loved math her entire life and after majoring in it in college, she went to her favorite professor and announced her intention to become a career mathematician. She was in the process of applying to graduate programs — what she wanted to know from him is what he did all day as a math researcher and professor. What fresh delights awaited her at the other end of her PhD?

The professor told her everything she wanted to know:

“Well, I wake up early, come into the office, work on my problem a bit while my mind’s still fresh, make a few phone calls, get ready to teach class, teach, come back to the office, work on my problem a bit more and then go home. On Tuesdays and Fridays I can work on my problem all day. I went to Geneva for a meeting about the problem last year — that was fun.”

Here she stopped him.

“So, there are other people working on your problem?” she asked.

“Oh yes — there are dozens of us now.”

“Wow,” she said. “I bet it will feel pretty good when you finally solve it. How long have you been working on it? How close are you to figuring it out, do you think?”

The professor looked at her and smiled as one smiles at a dog who is searching behind the TV for the deer that just raced across the screen.

“I’ve been working on this same problem my entire career,” he said. He was not a young man. “The guys who came up with the problem itself worked their whole careers just to formulate the question my colleagues and I are now trying to answer. It’s nice to know I’m contributing to it, but I doubt I’ll see it solved in my lifetime.”

And so, this woman decided to become an artist instead.

But remember: we each have a math problem — our own — and it’s also part of a bigger, collective math problem. Your problem unfolds in seconds and minutes, days, weeks, months. You will work on it for years in solitude and also with the people you love and hate, those you choose and others who are foisted upon you. Maybe your question will eddy off to become other people’s problems to solve.

I am not telling you this to discourage or depress you, but it’s likely you will not live to find the solution. Try to go in to work everyday, regardless. You’re the only one who can.