Self-Esteem in Mathematicians

Herbert S. Wilf

The College Mathematics Journal, Volume 21, Issue 4 (Sep., 1990), 274–277.
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 STUDENT RESEARCH PROJECTS
EDITOR:
Írl C. Bivens
Department of Mathematics
Davidson College Davidson, NC 28036
A student research project is an open-ended question or set of questions that is intended to give undergraduate
students experience doing "junior' mathematical research. Readers are invited to share especially interesting and
fruitful examples of Such projects in this section. Manuscripts should describe the project in a form appropriate for
presentation to the student investigator and should be no more than five double-spaced typed pages. Each
manuscript should have a COver page upon which is provided a title for the project, a short list of the mathematical
concepts involved in its investigation, and the affitiation of the proposer,
To further assist the editor in the evaluation of a project, the proposer should provide (separate from the
manuscript) an assessment of its difficulty and any information available about actual experience with the project,
such as the directions taken by students on the topic, the results obtained, etc. While untried projects are welcome,
Some justification should be given that students can make genuine progreSS in their research,
Please send all proposals, with appropriate references, to Irl C. Bivens.
Self-esteen in Mathematicians Herbert S. Wilf, University of Pennsylvania
Mathematics is in some ways a tough business. When you're a student you have to cope with those two
people who sit in the front of the classroom, who don't take notes about what the professor is saying, but
who seem to know all the right answers anyway. There you sit, trying to absorb the idea of an e that is
arbitrarily small but not zero, and there they sit, already seeing that the proof will work out better if it starts
with E/3 instead of starting with e. In every part of mathematics some people will have deep or quick
insights. It's hard for young people to believe that they too can have deep insights in their own ways, and
that these might be valuable too.
When you aren't a student any more, when you have your Ph.D. and you're trying to climb the ladder,
you go to professional meetings to find out what is new and who is doing it. Bad mistake. There you see
some very confident looking people telling you with flawless precision about the brilliant ways in which
they've solved something or other, and there you are again back into your student days, agreeing that the
idea does indeed prove the theorem, but wondering where on earth the speaker managed to get that
idea, and how on earth you are ever going to have ideas like that yourself. It would help if you had an
armor-plated ego, but you don't. What happens after that can be very complicated, but in this piece I'd
274 TE COLEGE MATHEMATICS ORNAL
like to go in the other direction, and look at the ego-strength problems that students have, and at what we
as teachers can do to improve the situation.
It must be true that a lot of people don't continue their mathematical education into graduate school
because they think that even though they like mathematics, they just don't have the right stuff. I have
been told that proportionately more young women fit this description than young men, so if we can indeed
figure out some ways to help then we will to that extent be promoting equality of opportunity along with
increasing the supply of good mathematicians.
But what can we do to help young people with their problems of self-esteem and worth as
mathematicians, particularly when many (all?) of us have similar problems as professionals? Gestalt
therapy? Group consciousness-raising sessions? Macrobiotic diets? Yoga? Nothing, really?
Self-confidence is the belief that you have a good shot at succeeding in something that you're trying to
do. Self-confidence increases when you successfully do something that you tried to do. It decreases
when you fail to accomplish something that you wanted to do. College teachers can help the growth of
self-esteem in mathematicians-to-be by providing situations in which students can succeed at
mathematical investigation, and by being quietly confident that their students will indeed succeed, given
only some time and some false starts.
People are smart. You can't fool them very easily about their own capabilities. You can tell someone
that they are bright but they won't believe you until they've seen the evidence. They won't believe that
they can be productive mathematicians until they see evidence that they can find new mathematical
understanding by themselves. Not in a team. Not as part of a groupthink. But by themselves, so the
results can clearly be identified as their own. It doesn't have to be a proof of Poincaré's conjecture, or
even something that is publishable. It just has to be something original that sheds some small ray of light
on the universe of mathematics.
What students need to build their self-confidence are genuine small successes of their own. Not in
some cooked up situation where the professor knew in advance how it would come out. That's homework,
not mathematics. People are hard to fool. It has to be something that surprises the professor too.
What colleges can do to build self-confidence in young mathematicians as undergraduates is
to provide opportunities for students to do supervised but open-ended independent study in
which they will be genuinely trying to find out something for the first time. To do research, if you
will. Not Major Research; that's for graduate school, and that isn't necessary. But to gain Some
small insights, to recognize some patterns, etc., that can clearly be labeled as their own. If a
student does do that, and if you see the small smile, and if you hear that the student does not
contradict your appraisal of his/her activity as real mathematics, then indeed you will have
scored one point for the Forces Of Light in the eternal battle with the other side.
How can colleges provide such opportunities? Well, many are doing it already. The statements that I've
made so far in this article will have left many readers yawning and ready to turn to the sports pages.
They've known the above for years and have been doing something about it. So I'm not writing about this
in the breathless spirit of discovery, but in the spirit of looking for ways to enlarge the number of such
independent study scenes that go on in our colleges and universities.
One thing that we need is a wide selection of educational materials that are directed towards this
problem. We need more books, articles, etc. that provide
WOL. 21, NO. 4, SEPTEMBER 1990 275
topics for independent study by undergraduates. This is hard. But we must, I think, face up to it
and get to work.
Computers can help a little. Computers can be used by students to look for patterns in complicated
things. When one finds a pattern in something difficult, that might be a small success, and it might lead to
a larger success if the pattern can be more completely described or proved or whatever. Computing by
itself will almost never be enough to promote mathematical self-confidence. People are Smarter than that.
They know that doing a computation isn't the same thing as doing mathematics. But computing can lead
to perceptions of patterns and they can lead to mathematics.
Good problems have to be open-ended. It's not so good to ask for a proof of some proposition. It's
better to ask the student to look around in a certain pile of oysters, hoping that some of them will contain
Small pearls, but not really knowing in advance if they do, or which ones might be the lucky ones.
Beyond that, I've just about run out of generalities. My first draft of this article ended here. Several
readers, however, said that the generalities were OK, but where were the specifics? What about
examples? Examples of this kind of thing tend to be long, so I had decided against including one.
However, here's a small example that turned up recently, and which I pass along to you even though I'm
aware of some of its limitations. It comes from discrete mathematics, for instance, in which things like the
following may be easier to find than in other branches. Anyway, here goes.
In Fig. 1 there is a printout (from Mathematica') that shows which values of the partition
function p(n, k) are odd (black disks) and which are even (white spaces). p(n, k) is the number
of partitions of the integer n into k parts, i.e., the number of ways of writing n = r + ' ' ' + r in
which the r's are positive and nonincreasing. Thus p(5,2) = 2 because 5 = 4 + 1 = 3 + 2. There
is no known simple test for the parity of p(n, k). The figure seems to show, however, that on
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Figure 1 The parity of p(n, k)
THE COEGEMA HEMACSOURNAL
lines that are parallel to the diagonal, p(n, k) has ultimately constant parity. That is, if we go far
enough in the Northeasterly direction along any line parallel to the diagonal the parities are
eventually constant. Is that true?
Readers who take a moment to work this one out will find that a lot more turns out to be true
than merely the parity being ultimately constant on each Subdiagonal. Also this example doesn't
meet the criterion of surprising this professor, since I now know how it comes out (though I didn't
know before I made the picture). But when I first did it I just wanted to see the graphic image of
the parity and to see what patterns there were (in fact there may be more patterns here than the
one that has just been cited).
Perhaps your students will be able to generate their own graphics and see patterns in them
that will make you sit bolt upright in your chair. This one doesn't turn out to be publishable
either, but that isn't necessary. A student who can find interesting computations to do, do them,
find interesting patterns in them, and prove that those patterns really exist, will certainly get a
good charging of the self-esteem batteries from the experience.
I hope that we will have good, healthy discussions among ourselves about how to do these
things, and that hundreds of flowers will bloom.
Rivalries Revisited
There was always with the Harvard faculty a slightly lofty attitude, a feeling that MIT was, in the
words of a guide published at the turn of the century, “that trade school down the river.” In
retaliation, MIT scientists regarded Harvard as a quaint liberal arts school trying to play catch-up
ball. While it was a long time since an eighteenth century Harvard professor insisted on his
contractual right to graze a cow on the Cambridge common, keeping the cow in his living room
during bad weather, Harvard still imagined itself more creative, eccentric, and donnish than the
grim gray drudges of MIT. They coveted stylish oddness. Sidney Coleman, a famous particle
physicist, had such a skewed personal schedule that when he was asked to teach a 10 a.m. class,
legend has it that Coleman replied, “Sorry, I can't stay up that late.”
Gregory Benford, Artifact, Tom Doherty Associates, New York, 1985, pp. 264-265.
VO. 21, NO. 4, SEPTEMBER 1990 277