Selling Mathematics to the Media

A New Year's review of 1986 in the British newspaper The Guardian included a collective obituary of public figures who had died during that year. There were long sections devoted to the arts, politics and sports. The only scientists mentioned were part of a ragbag collection of Nobel Prize winners (including the Peace Prize) and buried in the middle of them was—of all people—Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, of Scientology fame. As Old Mother Time begins to close her net curtains on this decade of scientific decline and neglect, scientists are complaining more and more that science does not get its fair share of media attention, and that even when it does get attention it is not treated seriously. What goes for science goes in particular for mathematics. (Hello there? Yes, we're here too. Did you know there are more mathematicians in the world than astronomers? Amazing, isn't it?) The total media coverage of mathematics in the past decade is less than that given on January 3 to pop star Elton John's sore throat. Mathematicians have not helped their cause by reacting to the press like a bunch of panicky old maids, afraid of opening the door to the milkman lest they lose their virginity. I am firmly convinced that when René Thom's catastrophe theory was reported as the greatest thing that had happened in mathematics since Newton invented sliced bread—sorry, calculus—it was because a lot of people thought that it was the only thing that had happened in mathematics since then. I don't blame them: nobody had told them any different. Recently the London Mathematical Society set up a standing committee on the public image of mathematics. A decade ago this would have been unthinkable. But then, a decade ago mathematics received twice the proportion of the Research Council budget that it gets now. The Americans, as you'd expect, have thought bigger. The Joint Policy Board for Mathematics is an umbrella organization representing the American Mathematical Society, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and the Mathematical Association of America; thus, it represents academics, applied mathematicians and teachers. It has recently appointed a full-time public relations officer for mathematics. A Good Story I wish more of my colleagues would make the effort to explain their subject to a wider audience. But they should be warned of what. they're letting themselves in for if they doff their mathematician's cowl for a journalist's trilby. Mathematicians are united in what they believe constitutes the kind of topic that deserves widespread publicity. It should be something sound, solid, serious and significant: a showpiece of mathematical genius, something we can all be proud of. Unfortunately these are not the criteria used by journalists. What a journalist wants is a story. What makes a good story? The most obvious stories are new results on famous unsolved problems: Fermat's Last Theorem, the Riemann Hypothesis, the Four-Color Problem. Another good hook is a catchy name: flying pancakes, the Monster simple group, catastrophe theory. Bizarre coincidences—five different research groups proving the same thing at the same time— are irresistible. So is anything that can be related to the real world— the dynamics of galaxy formation, the knot theory of DNA, how to win at blackjack. Genuine surprises, like the possibility of five celestial bodies disappearing to infinity in finite time, are appealing, as is anything controversial. Not every story that meets these criteria is worth writing, of course. I could probably sell the inside story of the latest calculation of pi to millions of decimal places on the latest Japanese supercomputer to everything from Britain's News of the World upwards—but I wouldn't, because the decimal expansion of pi has no significance for mathematics. Those who dare expose themselves to the public also expose themselves to its wrath, which can take unexpected forms. In a Guardian article on knot theory I made a jocular remark about Alexander the Great. A gentleman from the home counties took me severely to task. I never did quite grasp what my sin consisted of, but it had something to do with insulting the memory of the great man Alexander the Great by referring to him incorrectly as "the Great." One also risks editorial incompetence. When a proof of the Poincare Conjecture was announced, by Eduardo Rego of the Ruy Luis Gomez Center for Mathematics, University of Oporto, and Colin Rourke of Warwick, The Times (London) managed to state that it had been proved by Ruy Luis Gomez and Cohn Rourke. An urbane Portuguese gentleman telephoned me to point this out. Gomez was a highly distinguished mathematician who was also prominent in politics. Panic. A diplomatic incident was avoided only because Gomez had been dead for several years. Two more pitfalls form a duality. They are "local resident makes good" and "not invented here." The former is a kind of parochialism. A local newspaper will print any sort of rubbish about a lad or lass from the home town. The latter is chauvinistic: anything that foreigners do must be trumped by an achievement of our own people. The two are often combined. When the American mathematicians Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken solved the longstanding Four-Color Problem (i.e., every map can be colored using only four colors, so that adjacent regions have distinct colors) what did no less an organ than the Times Higher Educational Supplement (London) have to say about it? "Man Climbs Math Mountain." The article completely ignored the work of Appel and Haken, and described only the counterclaims of a Briton who was not even a mathematician. These were supported by specious arguments about who had solved the problem first. The British individual concerned was invited to the University of Illinois, where the alleged proof rapidly fell apart. Professional journalists can suffer too. Gina Kolata writes regularly about mathematics in Science in the United States. A few years ago Kolata came under fire for an article about the Russian mathematician L.G. Khachian's new algorithm for linear programming. As part of the motivation she has mentioned the "traveling salesman problem," which asks for the shortest route that visits all cities on a given list. Within a few days, newspapers worldwide were saying that Khachian had solved the traveling salesman problem, which wasn't true. But Kolata's article was perfectly correct: the media had garbled the message in transmission. Difficulties are compounded when, instead of reporting an established mathematical result, one attempts to report one that is still in the process of discovery. I think this is one of the most exciting ways to write for non-specialists—to involve them in the work while it is actually happening—but many scientists misunderstand the process and the motives behind it. This opens up new dangers. One is the accusation of "premature publicity." This reflects a confusion between what is proper for a mathematical journal and what is necessary when dealing with the media. It is rightly improper to publish, in the scientific literature, a claim to a mathematical result that is not accompanied by a rigorous, refereed proof. However, suppose you want to write a story for a newspaper or magazine about the very latest development in some area of mathematics. You can't wait for two years while the author circulates preprints for comments, corrects the mistakes, sends the thing off to a journal, waits for the referee to get around to reading it, and waits again while it goes through a lengthy publication process. So you must write the story as it is, warts and all, and await further developments. And there you face the really big danger. What do you do if it subsequently turns out that the discoverer has made a mistake? It's embarrassing, to say the least, but nothing short of clairvoyance can do much about it—apart from gluing your teeth together and burying your word processor in concrete. Many mathematicians act as if putting an error into print is the End of the World. But after two decades of news media trumpeting MIRACLE CURE FOR CANCER one need not, I think, be too fearful of the odd blunder in print. The readers don't treat all this stuff as gospel, chaps. The Poincaré Conjecture is a case in point. The gist of the conjecture is that the only object having a particular simple and important property—every loop in it can be continuously deformed to a point—is the three-dimensional analogue of the surface of a sphere. First posed in 1904 by Henri Poincare, it is the major unsolved problem in topology. When someone— other than a crank—claims to have probed it, you have an irresistible story line. So, when Rego and Rourke announced their proof to the mathematical community, I donned my journalistic trilby, took several deep breaths, and wrote about it for Nature and The Guardian. Rourke and I later wrote about the conjecture in New Scientist. We made it clear that the proof was still controversial, quoting the Danish poet Piet Hien: "A problem worthy of attack, proves its worth by hitting back." Hien was right. Almost a year after the proof was announced, Poincare did hit back. Rourke found a mistake while lecturing on the proof in Berkeley. A proof that collapses is not proof. But journalism doesn't work that way. A story that collapses is another story. Despite the odd difficulty, writing about mathematics offers many rewards. It makes a break from research and teaching, it's enjoyable, and it improves your expository style. It earns money! It's also good for mathematics. Mathematicians are beginning to make much more of an effort to communicate with the outside world, and it's working. Demand is outstripping supply. The more media and mathematics come into contact, the easier communication will get. If you feel like indulging in some mathematical journalism, I can offer some advice. A news article is a conversation, not a lecture. Be as sloppy as you like about technical fine points, but convey the spirit of the enterprise honestly. Make use of visual imagery and pictures. Draw out connections with the real world, if there are any, but don't invent them. Above all, remember that you can be serious about mathematics without being solemn at the same time. Media Woozie Hunting The media have a habit of behaving like Winnie-the-Pooh searching for the Woozie. You may recall that Pooh Bear, finding footprints, began to track them. Soon a second Woozle joined the first, then a third, then a fourth.... But Pooh was only following his own footprints. So it can be with the media. The original story is trampled underfoot and soon the media are gazing only at their own tracks in the sand. In the case of the Poincaré Conjecture, the story of the mathematics gave way to veiled controversy about the role of "publicity" in science. It now seems to have died down. My kids have just regaled the family with the video Re-Animator, based on a horror story by H.P. Lovecraft, full of headless mad scientists rushing around covered in gore. I hope my remarks here don't re-animate the Poincaré publicity corpse—that was kind of headless too. I don't think you can set out actively to "publicize" mathematics—not in the same way you can publicize Madonna's toothache. I wish you could. But there's no guaranteed audience for mathematics, no set channels of communication; no news columns, fanzines, or chat shows. You must cast your bread on the waters and wait to see if it floats. It may return in a soggy condition: Tomorrow's World, the BBC television program, combined the Poincaré Conjecture with some not-so-recent work on minimal surfaces, linked both to the Big Bang, and garbled the lot. But even then millions of people in all walks of life found out, for at least 20 seconds, that something new was happening in mathematics. I count that a positive success. The best thing that came out of it all was a marvelous article in the New York Times by James Gleick, who told the tale, controversy and all: mathematical content plus human interest. Anyone who read the article got several vivid impressions. Topology is powerful and important. New mathematics is going on all the time. There is an international mathematical community that cares about mathematics, argues about mathematics, and is absolutely committed to making sure that its mathematics is right. Those are exactly the messages that we need to get over. But we'll never do it if we're so scared of putting our trotters into our snouts that we never open them (our snouts, that is) until what we want to grunt about is as cold and unappetizing as last week's swill. Another of A.A. Milne's characters, Eeyore, would have known what to say about that attitude. "Pathetic," he'd say. "That's what it is. Pathetic." Stewart is a reader in mathematics at the Mathematics Institute, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.

Selling Mathematics to the Media

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