By Kathryn Stearns
This Q&A is part of a series of interviews exploring what keeps Dartmouth professors busy inside鈥攁nd outside鈥攖he classroom.
鈥淚n today鈥檚 quantified world, people should have some appreciation for what numbers are, what they can encode, because, like it or not, math is affecting your life,鈥 says Professor Daniel Rockmore. (Photo by Eli Burakian 鈥00)
is a professor of mathematics and the William H. Neukom 1964 Distinguished Professor of Computational Science, as well as director of Dartmouth鈥檚 . His research interests include complex systems, network analysis, machine learning, and cultural evolution. He is a frequent contributor to The Huffington Post and author of, among other publications, Stalking the Reimann Hypothesis, a book about prime-number theory. He recently spoke with Dartmouth Now about why he likes to talk about math.
If I鈥檓 counting correctly, your given name is a prime number.
Is that really true?
Well, you tell me, Mr. Mathematician. Take the letters in their ordinal position. D is 4, A is 1. That鈥檚 5. N is 14. That makes 19.
Yes, 19 is prime!
Do you have any idea why I am thinking about your name as a prime number?
Because I wrote a book about prime numbers?
That鈥檚 one reason. The other is that I recently saw a play called The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.
I saw that! I reviewed it for The Huffington Post.
OK, well, at the end, the audience is invited to discover whether their names add up to prime numbers. But apparently you didn鈥檛 figure that out. 鈥
Honestly, it was sort of a busman鈥檚 holiday. At the end, the audience is standing there totally amazed and engaged with this actor who鈥檚 explaining a famous mathematical proof.
Exactly.
Which was kind of funny, because that鈥檚 more than people talk about math, like, ever.
That鈥檚 a good segue, because your popular writing suggests that you crave to point out the beauty of math to a broad audience.
Writing those little essays makes me happy.
You鈥檝e said you鈥檙e 鈥渁 humanities guy who made a wrong turn.鈥
I enjoy words and I enjoy language. When people discover that you鈥檙e a mathematician, they put you in a particular kind of box鈥攁nd not a great box. It鈥檚 like, 鈥淲ell, I can鈥檛 talk to you about your work.鈥 I don鈥檛 like that, because I like to talk to people.
You try to make math less rarefied, less remote.
I think that鈥檚 the impulse. But there鈥檚 also a professional impulse, which is that I always have enjoyed studying mathematics in and of itself, and I鈥檝e always found it mysterious, confusing, beautiful at times, infuriating at other times, but something worth understanding in a broader sense. In today鈥檚 quantified world, people should have some appreciation for what numbers are, what they can encode, because, like it or not, math is affecting your life.
You鈥檙e looking at 鈥渂ig ideas,鈥 I hear, with other faculty members.
Yes, for a long time, in collaboration with colleagues, I鈥檝e tried to set up venues where the faculty could just come and talk. But the truth was that any lecture, as soon as the PowerPoint went up鈥攊t鈥檚 all lost, especially having a conversation. So we recreated it under a new name, 鈥淲hat鈥檚 the Big Idea?鈥 The meta big idea was that a couple of faculty would just stand up, no slides, and speak for under 10 minutes.
What are the big ideas that particularly interest you?
Ideas are often big only in the eyes of the beholder. Machine learning is one of the huge subjects of the day. My own particular interests actually have to do with trying to study the evolution of culture.
That doesn鈥檛 sound like a mathematician鈥檚 job.
Well, I鈥檓 not proving theorems (laughs). My biggest current project centers on legal texts and trying to understand the evolution of the law as left in the fossil record.
So you hope to derive an understanding of how some of the great legal minds used language to express cultural values?
One of the questions that we are able to address is the influence, or lack thereof, of clerks. How influential are clerks in the writing of opinions? Because we鈥檙e interested in this notion of influence, we have a way of throwing these documents into geometric space, so you could think of every document as being a star in a galaxy. Some documents have more gravity than other documents, so they attract ideas close by them, or they are on the fringe of the space. We combine tools of probability, computing, and geometry to create a space of documents that we can traverse and characterize its curvature and its mountains and its valleys.
Now you鈥檙e sounding like an astronomer. But why bother?
I鈥檓 not arguing that we need any of this. I鈥檓 just telling you that I鈥檓 enjoying doing it. In fact, I will say that what we鈥檙e doing will enable us to construct a different kind of search engine for legal documents that doesn鈥檛 exist now. I hope in about a year you can open up our browser and search huge chunks of the opinion database, in a very different way than you would use LexisNexis. Do we need that? I think some people who call for open government might say that you need that. What we鈥檙e doing will enable us to construct an open source search engine for legal documents that doesn鈥檛 exist now.
You鈥檙e running a competition.
You mean the Turing Test (testing whether an algorithmic response generated by a computer is indistinguishable from a human response).
Yes, to see whether a computer can write a sonnet, short story or compose music. What do you expect?
I wouldn鈥檛 be surprised if somebody passes the Turing Test with a sonnet. The short story is going to be complicated. It鈥檚 not hard to automatically construct a sentence. But narrative is the tricky part.
So how close are we to having computers indistinguishable from humans?
Well, it will happen.
Professor Andrew Hacker of Queens College has suggested that students need not take math after 10th grade. Do you agree?
I don鈥檛 know anybody who鈥檚 ever been hurt by knowing too much math.
Knowing the quadratic formula is like knowing Ode on a Grecian Urn, right? If you鈥檙e educated, you should know what the quadratic formula is.
If you could pick the brain of a mathematician or a scientist, living or dead, who would it be?
Oh, John von Neumann. Oh my god, he was amazing. There are no polymaths left.
Are you a polymath?
No. I鈥檓 a mile wide and an inch deep. Von Neumann had ideas about the brain, ideas about building a computer, important ideas in game theory, important ideas in quantum mechanics. He was an extraordinarily deep mathematician, both pure and applied.
Where are the polymaths these days?
This is the thing: There used to be giants. I could be wrong, but no one will write a history about Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates or Warren Buffett that reads like von Neumann鈥檚.
Do you agree with Freeman Dyson, who said: 鈥淭echnology is a gift of God. After the gift of life, it is perhaps the greatest of God鈥檚 gifts. It is the mother of civilization, of arts and sciences.鈥
Wow. Well, where do you start?
Let鈥檚 simplify the question. Are you a techno-optimist, pessimist, or agnostic?
I think it鈥檚 a question of vigilance. Nothing is for free. I think that with respect to technology, we鈥檝e been slow on the uptake. Interestingly enough, John Kemeny was one of the first people to think about it in a sort of serious, philosophical way.
As soon as people understood the notion of a gene and what a gene could do, the ethicists were all over it. But where were the ethicists when the first computer game was created? I think people have been surprised, actually, by how much computers have changed what it means to be human.
