Applied Mathematics
First I’m going to present a basic principle. It goes by many names, for instance,
The Check the Air Pressure in the Tires Principle or The Look under the Street Light for
Your Keys Principle.
The idea is that you try to solve a problem by using an easy technique that has no chance of success instead of using a difficult technique that has a chance to succeed. It is easy to ignore and give your kvetching neighbor bad glances, it is hard to love her.
This is a Principle that is often applied by students of mathematics. It seems so easy to memorize some formulae and then try to see which one works. To be successful they eventually have to realize that they are going to have to look for their keys where they dropped them, so to speak.
I was on the Undergraduate Committee and one of our tasks was to select text books. Every three or for years, depending on the greed of the publisher I suppose, publishers changed the edition of their calculus books. A book rep told me that at most universities they just rolled over to the new edition but at The University New Mexico we never rolled over to the new edition; at least not in the thirty years I was there. I give us credit for seeing that all the books sucked. After three or four years everybody realized the current book wasn’t working and when the edition change approached we started a search.
Finding a new text was difficult because the books were all so similar. It was like choosing a tract house to live in or choosing the prettiest snow flake.
At one text selection meeting I suggested that, since picking a book and then deciding what to teach didn’t seem to work, why didn’t we figure out what we wanted to teach and how to teach it and then pick a text. If we couldn’t find a satisfactory text, we could write one.
I was told that my suggestion was too hard, that nobody had the time, that we could never agree on what to teach or on who would be the lead author. On and on.
Since we were a democratic committee we chose another faceless book.
I have heard that, by one definition on insanity, an insane person keeps doing the same thing over and over and each time expects a different result.
There appears to be a movement to abolish habeas corpus and the problem is to restore that principle of law to high esteem.
Since legislative acts to curtail habeas corpus are being presented and enacted, there must be a motive force. If one wishes to protect habeas corpus a counter force must be applied. But where and how?
Not the right question. The question is, “Why do people attack habeas corpus?” Once you know that, you can make a better effort.
Let’s look at an egregious example, the war in Iraq.
The problem was to prevent the country going to war. There were those who were against the war in Iraq and they tried to stop it. They demonstrated, they wrote letters, they had meetings, formed committees and lobbied Congress. Evidently these efforts were unsuccessful.
Did the movement to go to war have infinite mass and hence was unstoppable or did the anti-war group fail to find the point where a counter force should be applied?
Since the murmurings of a war with Iran seem to be raising less opposition, it could be that the protesters are disheartened. It seemed as though they did everything they could think of but to no avail.
This discouragement is found in calculus students. They get tutors and think they are studying hard and after three successive failures give up and switch major.
My freshman year roommate drank a lot of beer and was failing calculus. He decided to spend a night in and study.
He opened up his book, got his desk cleared off, had paper and pencil at the ready. He started a problem and then decided he could think better after a shower. After his shower he looked at the problem for a while and then remembered that he hadn’t called his girlfriend. So the evening went.
Later that night his drinking buddies stopped by; they had missed him down at Gainors’ Bar and asked where he had been.
“Oh, I stayed in and studied tonight.”
Protests, unless they involve significant portion of the population, don’t apply much pressure at all, sound and fury signifying nothing. Probably most letters end up in the shredder.
It is true that the numbers of protesters did increase to a critical point when the sons from middle class were drafted and killed or injured in the Viet Nam War but the war in Iraq has no draftees. The avowed reasons for the war are so muddled and the metaphors so mixed that it is hard to find a point to protest against.
What do you protest against? The war is a fiat accompli. There are not a lot options let alone good options for policy in Iraq.
For example, we could pull out and let the Iraqis deal with the problem.
During the week or so before classes started at the beginning of my first year in college (RPI-1953) the college freshmen would riot with the local high school kids. The nightly riot took place at a spot downtown where two streets merged into one and formed a large enough area to accommodate a pretty fair sized riot. The police formed a cordon around the area and once you entered the riot you were committed; if you tried to leave the police pushed you back in.
It was an easy way to control the riot and nobody was seriously hurt. But Iraq is not a school boy’s rite of passage. Cordoning off Iraq and letting whoever is there fight it out has some ethical problems, at least I think so.
Once the war began I couldn’t really see any totally ethical policy changes nor did leaving the policy unchanged seem any better. Talk about being between a rock and a hard place. I guess if ethics is dropped from the equation, more options are available.
Here we see a case of an over determined system similar to trying to satisfy four kids with three televisions. Mathematics is everywhere.
If all actions can be protested it isn’t clear what a protest means. If there is no way to get from Damascus to Shangri-La, it hardly makes any difference which road you take out of Damascus. Protest needs a sharply defined issue.
If a student didn’t know how to construct the correct polynomial they just made one up. Since they had no idea where I got the polynomial when I worked a similar problem on the board, it was easiest to assume I made it up and that’s what they did.
What about the attack on habeas corpus?
The reason seems to have something to do with national security. National security seems to be the reason for everything, indeed it was one of the major reasons given for the Iraq adventure. I can’t think of a bill in the Senate that didn’t involve national security.
This is particularly true in the case of habeas corpus because the recent legislation takes habeas corpus away from detainees acquired in Iraq and Afghanistan; these detainees seem to fall in the terrorist category. And you don’t even have to be a terrorist to have your Constitutional right of habeas corpus in jeopardy.
In debate I hear that terrorists don’t deserve habeas corpus. There seems to be a sizable group that finds it acceptable to put them in jail and forget about them. This is a little disquieting because the definition of “terrorist” seems to be in the eye of the beholder. It is also mean spirited and “chicken shit”.
I have heard it said that it is too hard to give habeas corpus to all detainees, there are just too many of them. The logic behind this point of view seems to depend on the “Take the Easy Way Principle”.
The idea to remove habeas corpus is at least as old as King John. In the King John case the people who supported habeas corpus had more power than the king. In the current situation it looks like King John has the edge.
The people who want to restrict habeas corpus want to put people away and forget about them because that seems to be the only thing that habeas corpus deals with. As far as I can see it is more or less clear why the original King John wanted to do that but why now.
I can only speculate why our King John takes this attitude and even if I did know, I wouldn’t be able to change his mind. If someone already knows that their actions are unethical and do it anyway because they think they can, I can’t think of a convincing argument to dissuade them.
And tyranny is so much easier than democracy and habeas corpus and all that stuff.
But the populace is still in the mix and a bigger question is, “Why do the citizens allow it?”
My opinion is that fear and a desire for revenge have left the citizens in a quandary and they don’t know which way to turn. If they display compassion, at one time considered a virtue, and a respect for the Constitution, they are being soft on terrorism and condoning the people who are trying to destroy our values, whatever that means, and plant bombs.
Not only could a freed “terrorist” continue terrorizing if released (fear) but he would be getting away with being a “terrorist” (revenge). It is often said that justice is involved but I think that in common parlance, justice, a malleable term at best, means revenge.
To get the support of the citizens you have get rid of their fear and their thirst for revenge. People in a state of fear and seeking revenge for being made afraid, tend to be irrational.
In the presence of fear people don’t think rationally and there is no point talking to them; your words fall on deaf ears. When the fear is gone, they can be talked to.
Again I look at a first semester calculus class although the fear and thirst for revenge may start much earlier; fear of mathematics and revenge on the people who inflicted mathematics upon them.
The citizens must be told that freedom and democracy are neither safe nor easy. If the citizens can’t accept that, habeas corpus questions are beside the point.
Sorry, guys, that’s just the way it is. It all goes back to the Second Law of Thermodynamics and you can’t get around that.
Learning mathematics neither safe, I have heard of people becoming addicted, nor easy.
Jeffrey R. Davis
Assoc. Prof. Emeritus
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
University of New Mexico
He who steals my purse, steals trash
'twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands.
But he who takes from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
Yet leaves me poor indeed.(The Bard)
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