ENGL 324

Tianqi Dai (4/5/2016)

Popular Discourse Report
Recently, after I got an admission from graduate school, and knew that Ill start
another journey in math and stats, my brain came up with a question: why more than
75% people around the world dont like mathematics. Then I talked to my roommate,
she got a simple but unsatisfied solution: because math is tedious. So I tried my best to
find a popular discourse to proof that math is interesting, and also easy to comprehend.
So I found a video on YouTube1, theres a man who named Daniel Tammet, and
hes an English writer and mathematical savant. The most famous event related to him
is, he memorized and recited the mathematical constant pi into 22000 decimal places
and just only take 5 hours. So in the video, he shared his recitation methods to the
audiences. This video was published in 2005 by NBC, which name is Late Night with
David Letterman. Actually, Mr. Tammet has a severe autism since teenager, but
mathematics bring him to the normal life. You could easily see he did very well in this
talk show. Now he is a humorous and a wise mathematician, and be friendly to the
audience, wearing a sincerely smile.
When I first come to the United States, I changed my major from Pure Math (theory) to
the statistics. Related to my previous major, its very important for a student to find
interesting parts in mathematics, otherwise its too hard for a people to learn math. From
this popular discourse, we could see the best way to memorize formulas, we could see
the interesting meanings of an ordinary mathematical constant. Hope more and more
people could love math, math is not that hard and unfriendly as you imagine. Just as a
reminder, if you could pay more attention on a thing, youll do the thing in a better way.

1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2uRuFgZSDc