When Math is Mushy and Soft in Real Life

Math handed me undiluted friendship; boring ways to make money and more. Pristine and murky are passé for Math.

Full disclosure: I don’t have a Ph. D.

Math and Friendship

Once upon a time, I had the privilege of sitting across a gentleman with a freshly minted Ph. D.

That was my first opportunity to lead a team. I was doing interviews to make my first hire. It became crystal clear that I was sitting across a genius. I fell for his brain powers. Wanted to hire him, my boss also interviewed him. Cautioned me about his lightness on communication skills and yet encouraged me to make my own hiring decision.

I hired the physicist with the beautiful mind. We both understood English. The one challenge, he was picking up the language to speak.

As we spent time working together, one day, we naturally went to the whiteboard. He wrote and I interpreted. We nodded in agreement. We had cracked the code on how to communicate and collaborate.

If you zoomed back on the whiteboard, it was filled with equations — precise in the information, elegant in their compactness and above all a mutual handshake of thoughts.

I had a moment of epiphany.

Some call math murky, some call it abstract. From that day, I realized it was about “saying a lot while speaking very little”- a lazy…