Dividing by Zero

(With apologies to my physicist/mathematician father, my accountant grandfather, and my wife's best friend, also a mathematician and lover of numbers.)

The famous quote from the Bible, "The love of money is the root of all evil" is often misquoted as, "Money is the root of all evil." Neither is true. The root of all evil is math. Math is the tool of tyranny, the death of hope, and the destroyer of love and beauty and all that is good in humanity.

(If that seems a little over the top, I'm practicing my use of extremist rhetoric in preparation for the Presidential election. Besides, I've been reading R.W. Emerson: "Say what you believe today in words as hard as cannon balls." I love that guy. Column on him another time.)

Allow me to explain.

I started thinking about this when I was thinking about Leap Year. Now, I have to like Leap Year because my beloved wife was born on February 29, and so that makes Leap Year a good thing for me. But if that weren't the case, my hatred of Leap Year would be unalloyed.

We all know why we have a Leap Year. Our planet orbits the sun once every 365 and 1/4 days; therefore, to take care of that remainder and make everything come out even, we need to add another day every four years. Oh, except for century years; the year is not actually 365 and 1/4 days long, it's a little bit less, so every 25 Leap Years, we skip a year. So that it can come out even. So years like 1700, 1800, 1900 are not Leap Years.

Except for millennium years. See, the difference isn't exactly made up by skipping one out of every 25 Leap Years, so out of every ten skipped Leap Years, we keep one. So while 1900 wasn't a Leap Year, 2000 was. Because that way it all comes out even. Because we have to make sure that the calendar doesn't shift, that spring doesn't start a day earlier than it used to, not even one day every thousand years. Because that matters.

But then, of course, we seem to have no problem with the insane system of having a 365-day year divided into 7-day weeks. 52 of 'em. Which comes in one day short, which throws the whole calendar out of whack and has the same date falling on different days of the week in sequential years. Not to mention the way the year is divided into 12 months, which leaves 5 days left over, but instead of having 5 months that are 31 days and 7 months that are 30 days, we have 7 months that are 31 days long, 4 months that are 30 days long, and one month which is 28 days long. Except for Leap Year, when it becomes 29 days long. Except for century years, when it stays 28. Except for millennium years, when it goes to 29.

Are you starting to see how evil math is? No? How about this?

My third grade teacher told me, when she was teaching us subtraction, that you absolutely positively could not take a larger number away from a smaller number. The example given was, as usual, apples: you can't give me five apples if you only have three apples. Made sense to me, so I learned it: can't take big from small. Can't give away what you don't actually have. No problem.

Until 7th grade. When my math teacher taught us negative numbers. Then you could take larger numbers away from smaller numbers. The example given was digging a hole -- you could have empty space where something used to be. In keeping with the apples, you could owe somebody apples that you didn't yet have. Now we can have debt, to the celebratory cheers of the credit card companies and the mafia, and the hair-tearing wailing of everyone else.

But the teacher told us a new rule to remember about negative numbers: whatever else you could do with the things, as useful as they were in math, you could never, ever, take a square root of a negative number -- because no number multiplied by itself could equal a negative. Simply couldn't happen. Okay, I understood the negative x negative = positive rule, so I could see that. Put it in the bank, count on it, take it as a mathematically unbreakable rule: no square roots of negative numbers.

Until I got to 12th grade. And heard about i.

This is why math is evil. Math is evil because it creates a paradigm of absolutes, rules and strictures that cannot be broken with destroying the basic structure of the entire system. And then it breaks its own rules, over and over and over again. The only way this can work is by thinking abstractly, by divorcing yourself from reality; you cannot understand imaginary numbers and non-Euclidean figures and other higher mathematical concepts through observation of nature. You can only do these things inside your head. Math takes you away from the world.

Now that, in and of itself, isn't bad at all; lots of non-evil things take us away from the world. Sometimes the world needs to be gotten away from. But the evil thing about math is that it can be used to change the world, by those who have taken themselves out of the world. That's how you get atomic bombs, and actuarial tables, and efficiency experts. And our ridiculous bloody calendar. Nobody who ever lost themselves in the Hundred Acre Wood after reading Winnie the Pooh used those concepts to become an evil dictator, or create weapons that made dictatorships possible.

Although that would be pretty funny. If the next Hitler swayed people to his or her banner by promising hunny for all and no heffalumps.

Imagine if we didn't try so very hard to quantify everything. Sure, we wouldn't have modern technology, computers and cars and telephones -- but that also means we wouldn't have hackers and identity theft, global warming and offshore oil rigs, and telemarketers. We also wouldn't have to count our birthdays, to feel, as many people do, middle aged and then old despite vigorous health and a happy disposition. We wouldn't have to wait until we were 16 to drive, 18 to vote, 21 years old to buy alcohol, despite knowing full well that we were capable of doing those things earlier -- or proving over and over again that we couldn't handle them despite what the calendar says we can do. Would it be worth it to give up the years that modern medicine has added to our lives if we never knew, nor cared, how many years our lives lasted? Would we feel richer if we could never count our money, or poorer?

Maybe I'm being absurd. Maybe this is unrealistic and foolhardy -- I know several people on the debate sites I used to frequent who would be scoffing like madmen right now -- but then, really, is this idea any less absurd than the concept of i? Or the belief that the free market, so mathematically elegant on paper and so utterly debased by human nature, can actually solve all of our problems?

Math gets us more. More advanced technology, more advanced medicine, more advanced systems of predicting and therefore adjusting human behavior. But as another famous old cliche so rightly tells us: quantity is not quality. Perhaps, just perhaps, we would actually be better off with less. As long as we could never count what we had, we also wouldn't be able to count what we lacked.

Imagine that.