CONGRATULATIONS to the Class of 2020 from the research group!
And thanks to Prof. Chad Topaz for a wonderful commencement speech (one of the best I ever heard and so meaningful to me). Thanks to the guests who joined us.
The graduating class of 2020:
Postdoc: Heather Zinn Brooks
Undergrads: Qinyi Chen, Unchitta Kanjanasaratool, Tony Liu
PhD students: Michelle Feng, Yacoub Kureh, William Oakley
#truecolors
Here are a couple of pictures.
And here is the text of Chad's speech.
"Are mathematicians human?"
I was very unsure of how to begin this speech, and so I did the natural thing: I Googled “graduation speech opening” and I found a site with the following advice, which I am going to obey.
1. Offer formal words recognizing the honored guests.
I hereby decree that this honored group seems familiar; have we met before?
2. Use humor. If you are confident that your humor will work, making everyone laugh will be a great start.
I am confident. Please go ahead and laugh now.
3. Enthusiastically congratulate graduates on their success.
From my heart, congratulations.
4. State the topic of your speech.
Those of you who know me know that I often go against the crowd. Some graduation speech themes are all too common, so I’ll be avoiding the following messages in this speech:
- Challenges are opportunities
- Be yourself
- The world is your oyster
- Love will triumph over all
- With great power comes great responsibility
So, for this speech, I have chosen the topic “Are mathematicians human?"
I was a postdoctoral fellow in this department from 2003 - 2006. During the last year of my postdoc, and wanting desperately to stay in academia, I applied for tenure track jobs. While I was lucky to get a couple of offers, none of the offers would have resolved my dual career couple issues. It seemed reasonable that I'd have a better chance of finding work in Los Angeles than my husband would in rural Maine. So I made one of the hardest decisions of my life: I stayed in Los Angeles and, in doing so, quit being a mathematician. But not before, in a moment of extreme frustration and angst, I committed the only physically violent act of my adult life by hurling a bowl of oatmeal at the wall of my apartment.
Sometimes we don't realize what part of our identity means until we don't have it anymore. I didn't see this coming, but when I could no longer call myself a mathematician, or at least not professionally, I wasn't sure what I was anymore.
The next year of my life began fairly miserably. I worked as a college administrator on another campus in a unit that was a poor fit for me. I had few personal goals other than feeling sorry myself. Gradually, though, things turned around. I slowly built stronger relationships with friends. I got involved in service work related to issues I cared about. I rediscovered how much I loved playing chamber works with other musicians. I reconnected with all of the parts of myself that I had let shrink.
I stopped identifying principally as a mathematician and started identifying principally as a human.
But what makes us human? Characteristics and abilities once thought to distinguish us from other animals -- the use of tools, the ability to recognize ourselves, the size of our brains, and much more -- turn out to be found in various corners of the animal kingdom. Some evidence from the natural sciences, though, does suggest what makes humans unique.
First, we are human because of the degree to which we are wired to help each other. In psychology experiments, children as young as 14 months will spontaneously help a person who is struggling or who looks worried or who drops an item. At age two years, children will help someone who isn't even aware of their own need for help, say, because they didn't realize they had dropped an item. And rewards don't seem to play a role. In experiments on 20 month old toddlers, those who had previously received rewards for being helpful acted equally helpfully as a control group that hadn't received rewards. Other species certainly have been observed to engage in helping behavior, but within different parameters. For instance, close by on the evolutionary tree, chimpanzees will share food. Chimps, however, appear to be far more selective about their helping behavior, sharing only with close relatives or potential mates. In short, humans appear to be wired to be indiscriminately cooperative.
Second, we are human because of our ability to imagine and know things beyond our senses. Take the famous psychology experiment called the Sally-Anne task. In this task, there are two dolls named Sally and Anne. A young child, who is the subject of the experiment, sees Sally putting a marble in a basket while Anne watches. Then Sally leaves the room. While she's gone, Anne removes the marble from the basket and puts it inside a box. Then Sally comes back into the room. The experimenter asks the child where Sally will look for the marble, most children answer that Sally will look in the basket, where she had originally left it. The child knows that the marble is not there, but understands that Sally will have a different thought. Let me emphasize this: it's not merely that the child knows that the marble moved. The child can put themself in the mindset of another person and imagine what that person thinks. On the other hand, in a version of the experiment designed to assess chimpanzees, the chimps generally failed the test.
So two possible answers to "what makes us human" are our level of radical, selfless cooperation and our capacity to put ourselves in the shoes of another, a quality we sometimes refer to as empathy.
This speech would not be authentic if I did not call out that we are living during challenging times. Now let's be real: epidemic disease has been with humankind for a long time, with the earliest records of an influenza-like epidemic coming from central and Southern Asia around 1200 BC. Racial injustice has been with us in the United States since before we even WERE the United States. Still, we seem to be in an especially challenging moment right now, with bungled public health efforts and the continued killing of Black people by the police. It can be hard to believe that cooperation and empathy are our nature. So I take solace in the aforementioned scientific evidence and I say thank goodness for lab experiments.
It's not just on the national and international stages that the better parts of human nature can be obscured. You will have moments in your professional and personal lives when you will have the opportunity to put your humanity second to more immediate or more tangible or just plan easier ends. My message to you today is simple: always, first and foremost, be a human.
I asked Mason to give me a few very brief words about the human qualities of each of you, graduates. Mason respected my request... except for the brevity part! So please know that when I mention each of you, the brevity is mine, not his.
Heather, you are a valued and highly respected source of wisdom.
Michelle, your creativity and passion are inspirational.
Yacoub, you are driven to help, from each individual student up to saving the world.
Will, your good cheer powers not only your own efforts, but lifts those around you.
Quinyi, you have a rare blend of determination and humility.
Unchitta, you have limitless compassion.
Tony, you fearlessly reach out to those in need.
By the way, while today is mostly about you, graduates, it is also a little bit about Mason. It doesn't escape my notice that your advisor displays stellar human qualities as well, which is perhaps why we are drawn to him.
To the seven honored and accomplished celebrants, I wish you hearty congratulations and all the best for the future. Thanks to your hard work and dedication, you are outstanding students, scholars, teachers, mathematicians, thinkers. But most of all, you are outstanding humans.
