Stories Count

My Math Bio Story:  How Stories Count Came to Be

I confess…

I liked school from the very beginning. Actually, I just thought I liked school. What I really liked was learning to read.

Even before my first reading lesson invited me to “See Dick and Jane,” I knew why I wanted to read. Reading meant stories. Stories about tomorrow and today and yesterday and long ago. Stories about real people, some like me and some not, in the real world. And stories about fantastic, magical people in worlds of wonder.

But arithmetic didn’t thrill me…

Not at all. Better put, arithmetic didn’t interest me. Talk about irrelevant. I couldn’t figure out what arithmetic really meant or how it had anything to do with what mattered to me.

So throughout first grade, I avidly absorbed everything I could about reading, but when it was time for arithmetic, I did a lot of doodling and daydreaming. It took a while (and several unimpressive report cards) before I realized that I had to absorb, process, perform, and excel even in those subjects I didn’t particularly like. Especially arithmetic.

Then my mathematical luck turned…

Somewhere around the time that arithmetic turned into math, I had years of great experiences. Because I had some great math teachers. Math teachers who communicated clearly what math was really about, how it worked, and their expectation that of course I’d get it. They used explanations and images that drew upon familiar experiences and almost intuitive notions to introduce new, unfamiliar concepts and ideas. And now that the what, the why, and the how of math made sense to me—yes, I got it. I was able to grasp the order and the meaning of the patterns and relationships we studied.

Suddenly I loved math!

I didn’t know then that much, much later, I’d love math enough to study it in college and in graduate school. Or that I would commit myself to making math meaningful and useful to other people by using narrative and clear, concrete explanations, as my teachers had done for me. I just kept taking more and more math classes and loving the way math made sense to me.

I made it to an MS. And then, after graduation, I worked in fields that didn’t really use the specific topics I’d studied. Analytic geometry. Calculus. Number theory.  Abstract algebra. Nevertheless my work demanded habits of thought I’d developed when I was studying math. How to recognize abstract relationships and patterns. How to develop ideas and thoughts to reveal their logical connections. How to identify and examine conditions and possibilities systematically and thoroughly. How to do that delicate dance that integrates initial knowledge, insight, experimentation, and logical deduction. As a member of the corporate workforce, I’ve spent years programming computers, supporting computer systems, and managing computer projects.

Still, I’ve never lost touch with that first-grader who loved to read and hated to calculate. In fact, I’ve studied and taught humanities, literature, and writing as well as math and logic, and I became a performing storyteller. And as I developed my repertoire and my artistic vision, everything started to come together. Math and logic. Computer systems and projects. Humanities, literature, writing, and storytelling. And gift that so many math teachers had given me—the conviction that I—and just about anyone—can get it. “It” specifically being math and logic, or whatever is important.

And I became a storyteller, and…

For almost as long as I’ve been telling stories, I’ve been telling a tale I call “The Ruler and the Rice.” It’s a version of the Asian “chessboard” story that associates grains of rice with the squares of a chessboard: 1 grain for the first square, 2 grains for the next, 4 grains for the next, and so on. If you move through the chessboard square by square, always doubling the amount of rice, you run out of rice before you run out of squares. As you come to understand the pattern and the story, you figure out a lot of math.

I started to wonder if I could create stories that worked as seamlessly as the “chessboard” story, with math and logic woven so deeply into their structure that the math and logic come through effortlessly, as a byproduct of following the story. And if I could, would these stories enchant people with the wonder and beauty of math and logic? Or might they at least make math and logic more user-friendly to people who don’t love all things mathematical and logical as I do?

I accepted the challenge. I decided to develop a repertoire of stories that turned on math and logic and to use them to help people get it. I would illustrate and use mathematical and logical principles in ways that help people understand their meaning and value. I would demonstrate that STORIES COUNT.