Why not?

I think, first of all, primarily, we’re training them for their own sake, not for ours. Of course, community benefits will come out of the situation in some way. But mostly, it’s about their individual fulfillment that we’re here for when we’re educating them. How they find meaning in life, it’s up to them.

Secondly, I think mathematical sophistication is very important in understanding the world at present in many possible ways. You definitely need to have a sophisticated mathematical view that you combine with other things to understand the world. Now, if there are a lot of such people in society, then people who teach and produce new mathematics, it’s hard to think that they wouldn’t benefit from it. If, in other words, you have a mathematically sophisticated society, the status of the people who are specialists in mathematics [will improve].

What are some examples of social benefits that flow from mathematics?

Think about something like social choice theory, which is usually viewed as an area of economics. The idea is, we all have individual preferences, right? But somehow, we have to come up with a social decision. The most obvious thing is when we vote in an election, but it’s much wider than that. We’re turning individual choices into social choices all the time.

The first person to sort of make his name this way was Kenneth Arrow, who received the Nobel Prize for it. And Amartya Sen’s welfare economics is also based on social choice theory. And I think all of these people would admit right away that their conception of social choice theory was only possible because they had mathematical training. The formulation of social choice theory is all about functions and existence of functions of this or that type. So their ability to think abstractly about this process of taking individual choice, aggregating it and turning it into a social tree was deeply informed by mathematics.

Are there more concrete examples?

I guess maybe one way of saying it is there’s mathematics that’s used right away, for example, by an engineer in making a machine, or the information theory that goes into a phone. But here’s a question. Are Google’s search engines good for the world or not? Maybe some people think it’s bad, right? I tend to think it’s overall good. This accessibility of information around the world, I think, in spite of the chaos it introduces, eventually leads to better understanding of the world, and between people as well.

But of course what goes into the Google search engine is linear algebra. A rather abstract understanding of linear algebra is what made it possible. This kind of surprising innovation that leads to what’s almost, what you might even call an incalculable good. It often comes from a mathematical background. There are already many mathematicians who are applying insights of this sort to immediate challenges like the climate crisis, sustainable economics or accessible education. We would like to help these people and encourage more people to join the effort.