"I love mathematics" (Laughter) is exactly what to say at a party if you want to spend the next couple of hours sipping your drink alone in the least cool corner of the room.
And that's because when it comes to this subject - all the numbers, formulas, symbols, and calculations - the vast majority of us are outsiders, and that includes me.
That's why today I want to share with you an outsider's perspective of mathematics - what I understand of it, from someone who's always struggled with the subject.
And what I've discovered, as someone who went from being an outsider to making maths my career, is that, surprisingly, we are all deep down born to be mathematicians.
(Laughter) But back to me being an outsider.
I know what you're thinking: "Wait a second, Eddie.
What would you know?
You're a maths teacher.
You went to a selective school.
You wear glasses, and you're Asian."
(Laughter) Firstly, that's racist.
(Laughter) Secondly, that's wrong.
When I was in school, my favorite subjects were English and history.
And this caused a lot of angst for me as a teenager because my high school truly honored mathematics.
Your status in the school pretty much correlated with which mathematics class you ranked in.
There were eight classes.
So if you were in maths 4, that made you just about average.
If you were in maths 1, you were like royalty.
Each year, our school entered the prestigious Australian Mathematics Competition and would print out a list of everyone in the school in order of our scores.
Students who received prizes and high distinctions were pinned up at the start of a long corridor, far, far away from the dark and shameful place where my name appeared.
Maths was not really my thing.
Stories, characters, narratives - this is where I perezdonald@example.net.
And that's why I raised my sails and set course to become an English and history teacher.
But a chance encounter at Sydney University altered my life forever.
I was in line to enroll at the faculty of education when I started the conversation with one of its professors.
He noticed that while my academic life had been dominated by humanities, I had actually attempted some high-level perezdonald@example.net.
What he saw was not that I had a problem with maths, but that I had persevered with maths.
And he knew something I didn't - that there was a critical shortage of mathematics educators in Australian schools, a shortage that remains to this day.
So he encouraged me to change my teaching area to mathematics.
Now, for me, becoming a teacher wasn't about my love for a particular subject.
It was about having a personal impact on the lives of young people.
I'd seen firsthand at school what a lasting and positive difference a great teacher can make.
I wanted to do that for someone, and it didn't matter to me what subject I did it in.
If there was an acute need in mathematics, then it made sense for me to go there.
As I studied my degree, though, I discovered that mathematics was a very different subject to what I'd originally thought.
I'd made the same mistake about mathematics that I'd made earlier in my life about music.
Like a good migrant child, I dutifully learned to play the piano when I was young.
(Laughter) My weekends were filled with endlessly repeating scales and memorizing every note in the piece, spring and winter.
I lasted two years before my career was abruptly ended when my teacher told my parents, "His fingers are too short.
I will not teach him anymore."
(Laughter) At seven years old, I thought of music like torture.
It was a dry, solitary, joyless exercise that I only engaged with because someone else forced me to.
It took me 11 years to emerge from that sad place.
In year 12, I picked up a steel string acoustic guitar for the first time.
I wanted to play it for church, and there was also a girl I was fairly keen on impressing.
So I convinced my brother to teach me a few chords.
And slowly, but surely, my mind changed.
I was engaged in a creative process.
I was making music, and I was hooked.
I started playing in a band, and I felt the delight of rhythm pulsing through my body as we brought our sounds together.
I'd been surrounded by a musical ocean my entire life, and for the first time, I realized I could swim in it.
I went through an almost identical experience when it came to mathematics.
I used to believe that maths was about rote learning inscrutable formulas to solve abstract problems that didn't mean anything to me.
But at university, I began to see that mathematics is immensely practical and even beautiful, that it's not just about finding answers but also about learning to ask the right questions, and that mathematics isn't about mindlessly crunching numbers but rather about forming new ways to see problems so we can solve them by combining insight with imagination.
It gradually dawned on me that mathematics is a sense.
Mathematics is a sense just like sight and touch; it's a sense that allows us to perceive realities which would be otherwise intangible to us.
You know, we talk about a sense of humor and a sense of rhythm.
Mathematics is our sense for patterns, relationships, and logical connections.
It's a whole new way to see the world.
Now, I want to show you a mathematical reality that I guarantee you've seen before but perhaps never really perceived.
It's been hidden in plain sight your entire life.
This is a river delta.
It's a beautiful piece of geometry.
Now, when we hear the word geometry, most of us think of triangles and circles.
But geometry is the mathematics of all shapes, and this meeting of land and sea has created shapes with an undeniable pattern.
It has a mathematically recursive structure.
Every part of the river delta, with its twists and turns, is a microversion of the greater whole.
So I want you to see the mathematics in this.
But that's not all.
I want you to compare this river delta with this amazing tree.
It's a wonder in itself.
But focus with me on the similarities between this and the river.
What I want to know is why on earth should these shapes look so remarkably alike?
Why should they have anything in common?
Things get even more perplexing when you realize it's not just water systems and plants that do this.
If you keep your eyes open, you'll see these same shapes are everywhere.
Lightning bolts disappear so quickly that we seldom have the opportunity to ponder their geometry.
But their shape is so unmistakable and so similar to what we've just seen that one can't help but be suspicious.
And then there's the fact that every single person in this room is filled with these shapes too.
Every cubic centimeter of your body is packed with blood vessels that trace out this same pattern.
There's a mathematical reality woven into the fabric of the universe that you share with winding rivers, towering trees, and raging storms.
These shapes are examples of what we call "fractals," as mathematicians.
Fractals get their name from the same place as fractions and fractures - it's a reference to the broken and shattered shapes we find around us in nature.
Now, once you have a sense for fractals, you really do start to see them everywhere: a head of broccoli, the leaves of a fern, even clouds in the sky.
Like the other senses, our mathematical sense can be refined with practice.
It's just like developing perfect pitch or a taste for wines.
You can learn to perceive the mathematics around you with time and the right guidance.
Naturally, some people are born with sharper senses than the rest of us, others are born with impairment.
As you can see, I drew a short straw in the genetic lottery when it came to my eyesight.
Without my glasses, everything is a blur.
I've wrestled with this sense my entire life, but I would never dream of saying, "Well, seeing has always been a struggle for me.
I guess I'm just not a seeing kind of person."
(Laughter) Yet I meet people every day who feel it quite natural to say exactly that about mathematics.
Now, I'm convinced we close ourselves off from a huge part of the human experience if we do this.
Because all human beings are wired to see patterns.
We live in a patterned universe, a cosmos.
That's what cosmos means - orderly and patterned - as opposed to chaos, which means disorderly and random.
It isn't just seeing patterns that humans are so good at.
We love making patterns too.
And the people who do this well have a special name.
We call them artists, musicians, sculptors, painters, cinematographers - they're all pattern creators.
Music was once described as the joy that people feel when they are counting but don't know it.
(Laughter) Some of the most striking examples of mathematical patterns are in Islamic art and design.
An aversion to depicting humans and animals led to a rich history of intricate tile arrangements and geometric forms.
The aesthetic side of mathematical patterns like these brings us back to nature itself.
For instance, flowers are a universal symbol of beauty.
Every culture around the planet and throughout history has regarded them as objects of wonder.
And one aspect of their beauty is that they exhibit a special kind of symmetry.
Flowers grow organically from a center that expands outwards in the shape of a spiral, and this creates what we call "rotational symmetry."
You can spin a flower around and around, and it still looks basically the same.
But not all spirals are created equal.
It all depends on the angle of rotation that goes into creating the spiral.
For instance, if we build a spiral from an angle of 90 degrees, we get a cross that is neither beautiful nor efficient.
Huge parts of the flowers area are wasted and don't produce seeds.
Using an angle of 62 degrees is better and produces a nice circular shape, like what we usually associate with flowers.
But it's still not great.
There's still large parts of the area that are a poor use of resources for the flower.
However, if we use 137.5 degrees, (Laughter) we get this beautiful pattern.
It's astonishing, and it is exactly the kind of pattern used by that most majestic of flowers - the sunflower.
Now, 137.5 degrees might seem pretty random, but it actually emerges out of a special number that we call the "golden ratio."
The golden ratio is a mathematical reality that, like fractals, you can find everywhere - from the phalanges of your fingers to the pillars of the Parthenon.
That's why even at a party of 5000 people, I'm proud to declare, "I love mathematics!"
(Cheers) (Applause)
Me and the boy wear the same shoe size.
He wants a pair of Air Jordan 4s for Christmas.
I buy them, and then I steal them from his closet, like a twisted Grinch-themed episode of "Black-ish."
(Laughter) The kicks are totems to my youth.
I wear them like mercury on my Black man feet.
I can't get those young freedom days back fast enough.
Last time I was really fast I was 16, outrunning a doorman on the Upper East Side.
He caught me vandalizing his building, not even on some artsy stuff, just ... stupid.
Of all the genders, boys are the stupidest.
(Laughter) Sixteen was a series of barely getting away and never telling my parents.
I assume that my son is stewarding this tradition well.
Sixteen was "The Low End Theory" and Marvin Gaye on repeat.
Sixteen is younger than Trayvon and older than Emmett Till.
At the DMV, my boy's in line to officially enter his prime suspect years: young, brown and behind the wheel, a moving semaphore, signaling the threat of communities from below.
On top of the food chain, humans have no natural predator, but America plays out something genetically embedded and instinctual in its appetite for the Black body.
America guns down Black bodies and then walks around them, bored, like laconic lions next to half-eaten gazelles, bloody lips ...
"America and the Black Body" on some Nat Geo shit.
Well, he passes his road test at the DMV.
He does this strut C-Walk broken "Fortnite" thing on the way in to finish his paperwork, true joy and calibrated cool under the eye of my filming iPhone, the victory dance of someone who has just salvaged a draw.
He's earned this win, but he's so 16 he can't quite let his body be fully free.
When he's three, I'm in handcuffs in downtown Oakland.
Five minutes ago, I was illegally parked.
Now I'm in the back of a squad car, considering the odds that I'm going to die here, 15 minutes away from my son who expects that in 18 minutes, daddy's gonna pick him up from preschool.
There are no pocket-size cameras to capture this moment, so.
I learned a lot of big words when I was 16 getting ready for the SAT, but none of them come to me now.
In the police car, the only thing that really speaks is my skin.
I know this: I was parked on a bus zone on 12th and Broadway, running to the ATM on the corner.
I pull the cash out just as a police car pulls up behind me, give him the "Aw shucks, my bad," that earnest Black man face.
He waits till I'm back in the car and then hits the siren, takes my license with his hand on the gun, comes back two minutes later, gun drawn, another patrol car now, four cops now, my face on the curb, hands behind my back, shackled.
I'm angry and humiliated, only until I'm scared and then sad.
I smell like the last gasp before my own death.
I think how long the boy will wait before he realizes that daddy is not on his way.
I think his last barely formed memory of me will be the story of how I never came for him.
I try to telepathically say goodbye.
The silence brings me no peace.
The quiet makes it hard to rest.
In the void there is anger mushrooming in the moss at the base of my thoughts, a fungus growing on the spine of my freedom attempts.
I'm free from all except contempt, the spirit of an unarmed civilian in the time of civil unrest, no peace, just Marvin Gaye falsettos arching like a broken-winged sparrow, competing against the empty sirens, singing the police.
Apparently some cat from Richmond had a warrant out on him, and when the cop says my name to dispatch, dude doesn't hear "Marc Joseph," he hears "Mike Johnson."
I count seven cars and 18 cops on the corner now, a pride around a pound of flesh.
By the grace of God, I'm not fed to the beast today.
Magnanimously, the first cop makes sure to give me a ticket for parking in a bus zone, before he sets me free.
The boy is 16.
He has a license to drive in the hollow city, enough body to fill my shoes.
I have grey in my beard, and it tells the truth.
He can navigate traffic in the age of autonomous vehicles.
You know, people say "the talk," like the thing happens just once, like my memory's been erased and my internet is broken, like I can't read today's martyred name, like today's the day that I don't love my son enough to tell him, "Bro, I really don't care about your rights, yo.
Your mission is to get home to me.
Live to tell me the story, boy.
Get home to me."
Today's talk is mostly happening in my head as he pulls onto the freeway and Marvin Gaye comes on the radio.
I'm wearing the boy's shoes, and the tune in my head is the goodbye that I almost never said, a goodbye the length of a requiem, a kiss, a whiff of his neck, the length of a revelation and a request flying high in the friendly sky without ever leaving the ground.
My pain is a walking bass line, a refrain, placated stress against the fading baseline.
Listen, this is not to be romantic, but to assert a plausible scenario for the existential moment.
Driving while Black is its own genre of experience.
Ask Marvin.
It may not be the reason why you sing like an angel, but it surely has something to do with why heaven bends to your voice.
The boy driving, the cop in the rearview mirror is a ticket to ride or die.
When you give a Black boy "the talk," you pray he is of the faction of the fraction that survives.
You pitch him the frequency of your telepathic goodbye, channel the love sustained in Marvin's upper register under his skullcap.
Black music at its best is an exploded black hole responding to the call of America at its worst.
Strike us down, the music lives, dark, like tar or tobacco or cotton in muddy water.
Get home to me, son.
Like a love supreme, a god as love, a love overrules, feathers for the angelic lift of the restless dead, like a theme for trouble man, or a 16-year-old boy, free to make mistakes and live through them, grow from them, holy, holy, mercy, mercy me, mercy, mercy.
Thank you.
(Applause)