{"id":15393,"date":"2018-04-03T15:21:26","date_gmt":"2018-04-03T21:21:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/speeches.byu.edu\/?post_type=speech&p=15393"},"modified":"2022-06-14T14:55:27","modified_gmt":"2022-06-14T20:55:27","slug":"seeing-things-differently","status":"publish","type":"speech","link":"https:\/\/speeches.byu.edu\/talks\/michael-dorff\/seeing-things-differently\/","title":{"rendered":"Seeing Things Differently"},"content":{"rendered":"
I\u2009have a confession. I have been wondering whether I should admit this to such a large crowd, but here we go. My confession is that I love mathematics! I know that for some of you, the word math<\/i> brings a flood of bad memories. So before people get up to leave, let me share with you a different way to see math.<\/p>\n
Seeing Beauty<\/b><\/p>\n
Unfortunately, many people have the mistaken idea that math is just a set of rules and calculations. That is not mathematics.<\/p>\n
My family and I love the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament. Sitting around with friends and watching an underdog team beat a highly favored team with a last-second desperation shot is exciting. Compare such a thrilling basketball game to being alone in a gym shooting hundreds and hundreds of free throws. If all I ever did were to shoot free throws over and over all by myself and never play or watch a real game of basketball, I wouldn\u2019t like basketball. The same is true with math. Doing endless math drills is like shooting free throws over and over. It is not mathematics.<\/p>\n
To me, math can be like a game of strategy, such as The Settlers of Catan. Once you know the rules of the game, you can explore where the game can take you. In some ways math is like genealogy. You have several family lines to work on, and you may get stuck. But then a new piece of information opens up a previously blocked family line. You get excited and new results are uncovered. The same happens with mathematics.<\/p>\n
You could be working at the Disney Research Group using math to create realistic-looking hair in the movie Moana,<\/i> you could be designing a new method for Netflix to determine what movies a subscriber would like, or you could even be working on an abstract math problem that uncovers new results, such as finding a fast algorithm to determine whether or not a number is prime. That is how I see math and why I love it. To me, mathematics is beautiful.<\/p>\n
Now, the world has many beautiful things. Watching a rising full moon peek over the Wasatch Mountains on a dark winter night, sitting outside on a New Hampshire fall evening while savoring poetry by Robert Frost, listening to the Vienna Philharmonic perform Beethoven\u2019s Symphony no. 9 in D Minor in the 150-year-old neoclassical Wiener Musikverein concert hall\u2014all of these things are beautiful to me.<\/p>\n
Likewise, mathematics is beautiful. Some of you may think I am crazy. Remember, when I think of math, I am not talking about the endless drills that you probably did in high school.<\/p>\n