Math Babe, Revealed
And how she helped a longform story from an unknown site get to 120,000+ page views.
We promised to find Math Babe, the person we believed was most responsible for the viral spread of Caroline Chen’s “The Paradox of the Proof,” the seemingly arcane tale of a Japanese mathematician’s much-debated solution of the elusive ABC Conjecture. Caroline’s story had drawn 120,000 of the 140,000 unique page views during a 10-day experiment last spring at Columbia called “Project Wordsworth: How Much Is A Story Worth to You?”
Given the subject and the competition — stories about porn, mixed martial arts champion Anderson Silva, the Holocaust, the murder of football great Sean Taylor — this seemed a little odd.
But after hearing a few weeks ago from our social media contest winner Steven Lau about his success in finding a “key influencer” to help spread word about “The Man Who Hid in an Airplane Bathroom” we concluded that if Math Babe had been so instrumental in generating all that sharing of Caroline’s story we had to find her so that we might learn, and share, her secrets.
The search took us…not far at all.
Math Babe, we discovered, had recently taken up residence not three floors away at the Columbia School of Journalism, where she is running a new data journalism program.
Math Babe has a name and it is Cathy O’Neil. She is a number theorist who in 2011, after teaching and then working not terribly happily in finance, started her eponymous blog.
We liked her a lot, very quickly. Cathy is funny and blunt and had wonderfully dishy things to say about the subject of Caroline’s story, Shinichi Mochizuki, whom she had seen around campus when she was in graduate school at Harvard and who, she told us, was “famous for killing off interested undergrads” who wanted to be math majors: “He was like an evil guy.”
As Caroline wrote, while no one doubted Mochizuki’s brilliance, many in the math world doubted his proof, in good measure because hardly anyone could make sense of the 512 pages he posted online and for which he refused to offer any further explanation. In elementary school this is known as not showing one’s work. Mark it zero.
Caroline’s story had the elements of a good yarn — drama, intrigue, a sort-of evil genius. We had assumed that given the kind of traffic it drew, the Math Babe blog enjoyed a social following that rivaled that of the current champ, Katy Perry — over 52 million Twitter followers.
So we were a little stunned to learn that the blog has about 2,000 subscribers and that on any given day has about 3,000 visits, which was roughly the traffic on the day Cathy posted about the piece.
Caroline had interviewed Cathy for the story, and had sent along a link when it went live. Cathy posted it with little fanfare. The post was short. It took issue with the headline. Cathy wrote, “The article is nice.”
Nice?
That was it. No Must Read. No See Here.
Cathy did do Caroline a favor by omission: she did not include a summary of the piece, reasoning that if people wanted to read this “nice” story they’d have to open the link.
Those who did, Cathy told us, cared deeply about the subject, were part of the debate and also represented a constituency often overlooked by most everyone else: very smart math people. Cathy had alerted them that their world was being written about. “They just wanted to see themselves written about,” Cathy said. And so they began to share.
But if it were only mathematicians sharing the story, how did it get spread so widely?
The answer, Cathy explained, could well lay in whom besides the math faithful followed her. She has noticed that her posts were sometimes linked on the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times sites. Which, in turn, suggested that if Cathy-as-Math Babe was the key influencer, she was followed by other influencers whose followings far exceeded her own.
Within days of Cathy posting Caroline’s story it appeared on Hacker Nation. Then the BBC. Then The New Yorker’s suggested weekend reads.
A network had seemingly formed around Caroline’s story.
Or was that network already there, waiting to be activated, and, in turn, creating ever more networks?
We had sought out Math Babe to learn the secrets of a key influencer. And much as we enjoyed the chat we came away concerned that we had been delivered back to the less-than-sunny world view of network theorist Duncan Watts. Watts, the author Six Degrees, held that just because a network formed through a particular set of circumstances did not mean those circumstances could be repeated and a new network formed.
By this logic we could post a brand new really terrific math story tomorrow and prevail upon Cathy O’Neil to post about it (with a tough-to-earn “nice”) and see the story go exactly nowhere. Or viral. Or surface, weeks later, and take off.
But there was also another sunnier, conclusion to be drawn: a story did not need Katy Perry to succeed. Katy Perry was surrounded by 52 million people joined together only by their fondness for Katy Perry. They were a large network but perhaps not a very effective one, unless the subject was Katy Perry.
Cathy O’Neil, on the other hand, sat in the middle of an existing network of people whose connection to one another was far deeper, and therefore potentially more powerful. Each of them, in turn, was part of other networks, where their influence might be felt.
The math world, small as it might be, is, in the parlance of the times, an engaged community — a group of people who populate a universe of common interest. Mathematicians, it can be said, love gossip and intrigue just as keenly as people who cannot calculate a tip. They are like a family, and Cathy is like the relative who takes it upon herself to make sure everyone knows about so-and-so’s engagement, or impending gall bladder surgery.
You know that person. You just never thought that way about them.
What would we do without them? How would we know what’s going on? How would we know what to tell everyone else without someone to get the conversation started?
—Michael Shapiro (@shapiromichael) | Founder, The Big Roundtable
Read “The Man Who Would Save Jazz,” the latest original from The Big Roundtable. Saying Chico Hamilton was a jazz drummer is like saying Babe Ruth played baseball. Hamilton performed with just about everybody who was anybody in jazz—Charles Mingus, Dexter Gordon, Lena Horne, Count Basie, Eric Dolphy, to name a few—for decades, and his constantly evolving Chico Hamilton Quintet spawned many a successful career. So did the New York music school that he co-founded and where he taught, while steadily performing and recording. In short, Hamilton waged a seventy-year long-haul battle for the relevancy of jazz. Dean Meyers (@DeanBLMyers) trailed El Chico and his drum set from big stages to small venues to the classroom to intimate living room conversations, all in an effort to find out: Did he win his battle for jazz, or did he run out of time?
