Ted Audio Collective.

Audio Collective.

You're listening to How to Bea Better Human.

I'm your host Chris Duffy. On today's episode we're going to be

talking about math and before you skip this episode because you're saying to

yourself I'm not a math person listen that is exactly what I would have said too. I was an English major. Math has always

seemed like something that other people do, but surely, surely not me.

Until I read a book by today's guest, Francis Sue.

And that is when I realized that there's a lot more to this subject than I had ever realized.

It's kind of like how sometimes when I tell people I'm a comedian, they go,

oh, I could never do that. I I am not funny I could never tell a joke

but everyone has some sort of sense of humor right and Francis convinced me that we all have

some inherent mathematical sense too. So how do we break the

stereotypes around who math is for and how do we stop seeing math as a test of whether

we're good at adding things up but instead as an amazing way to understand and enhance our

humanity. Well, here is what today's guest, renowned mathematician and author Francis

Sue, has to say about that. The usual way people think about math is

something you do to compute a tip at a restaurant, right? It's mechanical, it's often

something that just we do because we don't have a calculator handy.

And I think that's a very impoverished view of what it means to do math.

I mean, I like to say anything a calculator can do isn't math because math is actually more about thinking. It's more

about the virtues that are built by engaging in understanding. Math is more about aspects of character that you build, like

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