Most People

To pursue Professor Hardy’s notion a step further, consider that many people cannot tell you the difference between a participle and an infinitive. Still, they carry on endless conversations. Such conversations go in many directions and ultimately end up leading to beneficial results.

The student who contended that college calculus is a way that college professors determine who cannot do math lacked the perspective afforded by a trade school teacher who once remarked, “Not everyone can do all the math that there is to do, but almost everyone can do some.”

This perspective could probably cause something on the order of a revolution if extended to encompass college classrooms and other arenas in which people set about trying to learn math. This perspective ultimately leads to the idea that math can become a medium of conversation.

When something is a medium of conversation, it becomes a language itself rather than a topic you address using a language. You just do it. You do not question whether you can do it, have the genetic capacity to do it, or have earned the right to do it.

Professor Hardy’s notion was that math is a medium of conversation, something you just do. When you do it, you do not need to make the first question one of whether you do it well. You do not need to judge yourself or be judged.