Humanities for Mathematicians

By Pup Horst

I secretly want to run away and become a humanities professor. I’m not sure which discipline specifically—general philosophy might be too general and religious studies might be too specific, and I worry I’d be no good with literature. But it’s a romantic idea, isn’t it? Sitting in a room with students brimming with fresh ideas, discussing nuanced and moving topics, learning more about ourselves and each other through thoughtful dialogue. Never mind that grading essays is likely a horrible experience, and never mind that students won’t always come prepared to class; it’s my idle fantasy, so I get to decide how idyllic it would be!

Surely I can’t literally run away and become a humanities professor, right? It’s not like I’m fortunate enough to have free tuition because I’m faculty, right? It’s not like I literally once told myself this whole “math professor” thing was just to gain access to said free tuition forever, right? Surely I couldn’t use that free tuition to slowly get another degree in a humanities field, right? Surely such a change in career is nonsense, right? …right?

**Sad mathematician with no humanities**

Existential crisis aside, I try to engage in activities on my campus that can afford me the joys of my imagined role of humanities professor—but of course, without the drawbacks of the actual hardships those professors have. These mostly take the form of various diversity initiatives on my campus. With either large or small groups of students for either short or long periods of time, I help facilitate various workshops. At these workshops, the students discuss and explore matters of identity and personhood, how they relate to each other and to themselves, and how we can all strive to make our time together in this world better and more meaningful.

All of those workshops are a delight to help facilitate, and they’re all about important matters. But none of them involve math, do they? And despite what I said about this whole “math professor” thing being a ploy to get free tuition forever, that’s not really the whole truth, is it? Obviously I was initially drawn to math for a reason; it sure would be nice if that secret “humanities professor” thing had a bit more, well, math involved with it.

I’ve been thinking about all of this for a while now, but not much has ever really come of it. Mainly, I’ve continued along as I always have. I took a few semesters of Japanese for fun, I kept helping out with various initiatives on campus, and I kept teaching (and enjoying!) my math classes.

Then one day, I was at MathFest 2023 in Tampa, Florida. At that time, Florida was perhaps a difficult place for some of us to be. This of course was all notable enough that we had a post here at Math Values about it, Being There. The careful reader will notice that I was one of the interviewees for that post; this was quite the unexpected accident!

I had heard about Being There through the illustrious MAA grapevine. Initially, I sure had some thoughts about the project, but I was too busy experiencing MathFest to do much about it. Then, on my way home, my flight got delayed! And then, my flight got delayed! And then yet again, my flight got delayed!

During my disastrous morning, afternoon, and evening sitting at the gate, serendipity occurred—one of the co-authors of Being There happened to sit next to me! Our conversation eventually turned to the upcoming post, and rather than be polite and demure, I launched right into a brief overview of those thoughts of mine. Turns out, folks thought I might have interesting things to say, so I was officially brought on as one of the interviewees.

I won’t go into all the behind-the-scenes details. Basically, I wrote quite a lot of my thoughts down, and then worked back-and-forth with the co-authors to broadly agree on a final version of the post. But then, after all of that, the current editor of Math Values decided to ask me to serve on the editorial board. I promptly said yes!

Probably I should have at least waited to hear the details of the position before agreeing, but why let caution impede romanticism? The entire process of working with the team on Being There, that, that was it! That was us doing a “humanities” and with math involved too! How could I possibly refuse the chance to help out and be a part of this going forward?

The very essence of Math Values is humanizing mathematics! There are many, many mathematics publications in the world, and all but vanishingly few of them are research journals. What we have here is so much more exciting, and dare I publicly proclaim, so much more important than those research journals. We have an opportunity to discuss important, humanistic matters while also bringing our full mathematician selves to these conversations. It’s literally what I’ve been hoping for, and no need to make potentially disastrous career changes!

And that’s why I’m here! I look forward to working with each and every one of you!

Thanks folks!

Pup Horst is currently faculty at Case Western Reserve University and the deputy editor of MAA Math Values. While xyr work was originally in lower-dimensional higher category theory, these days xe focuses primarily on pedagogy and teaching. In addition to finding xem dancing xyr way through math classes, you can find xem working with xyr cohort of Posse scholars, a group of diverse, leadership students on campus xe mentors as part of xyr role as Posse Faculty Mentor.