WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

This is on point. I'm Megna Chakrabardi.

Eugenia Chang already loved math by the time she was in kindergarten.

She went on to specialize in math, in category theory specifically, and she earned a tenured position teaching math in England.

But then she had a change of heart. She now teaches math to budding artists at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and writes books to help non-mathematically inclined people understand how math fits into their everyday lives.

She's out now with a new book.

It's called Unequal, the mathematics of when things do and don't add up.

Eugenia Chang, welcome back to One Point.

Hi, thank you so much for having me.

Let me first ask you, let's go straight into some of the math, and then we'll talk more

about your own mathematical history. Okay. So things being unequal. One equals one, fairly straightforward? Yes or no?

Pretty straightforward, yes. Okay. So we'll increase the complexity a little bit.

Okay. And then so is like two plus three equal to three plus two two? Two plus three says I'm going to

take two things and then I'm going to take three things and three plus two says I'm going to

take three things and then I'm going to take two things and you may be so used to the fact that

that just equals five that you haven't noticed anymore that those were two different

processes. And if you've ever helped small children learn how to add things up, and I love

helping small children with things, then it takes them a while to understand that that is

definitely going to produce the same total number of things because there really is something

different going on. It's a different journey, a different process that happens to lead to the same

outcome. Okay, this is fascinating. So let's increase the complexity ever so slightly.

Because actually I think in terms of teaching my own kiddos basic mathematics, it really came home to me when learning multiplication, right?

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