Q&A: Ben Orlin

Ben Orlin is the author and
illustrator of the blog Math with Bad Drawings, which was launched in 2013. He
recently published a collection of cartoons called “Math with Bad Drawings:
Illuminating the Ideas That Shape Our Reality.” The book uses humor and popular
culture to contextualize math for its audience.

The Mercury sat down with Orlin when he
visited UTD for a talk at the Mathematical Sciences Colloquium, “The Unlikely
Friendship between Science and Math,” on Feb. 13 and discussed both his blog
and his book.

Do you have your own hypothesis
as to how your blog got so popular?

I think there’s a certain
amount of randomness to anything that gets popular on the internet. I know that
visuals are very important for teaching math and talking about math. I also
knew that I couldn’t draw, so I explored other options for a while. I thought
about asking a friend to illustrate the blog, I thought about doing photographs
or something and wound up deciding that basically it was going to be too
inefficient to try to get anyone else to illustrate it, so I was going to have
to do it myself. And then at that point I needed to have a very upfront
disclaimer as to how bad the drawings were, so that’s where the title came
from.

Would you have any tips for
college students who are struggling with math?

I think
every experience that a student has in a class is kind of individual and
unique, so the best thing you can do is try to draw upon the teacher who’s a
person there in the classroom for you who’s there to bear witness to whatever
your particular successes and struggles are. Trying to develop a relationship
with the teacher and going to them during office hours with questions is
probably the No. 1 thing that’s useful across all subjects. And then the other
advice I would have would basically be aware of some of the obstacles that can
crop up particularly in math.

About
struggle and failure, why do you think it feels so bad to fail at a math test?

There is something about
mathematics where … there is kind of a black and white quality to mathematical
truth. But there isn’t a black and white quality to mathematical thinking —
mathematical thinking can be just as rich and varied and have all different
directions and different elements to it. I think because mathematical work is
often graded in this black and white way, we have this impression that our
thinking is either purely right or purely wrong when it almost never is.

How long does it usually take
you to come up with a post?

It
depends. I tend to have a whole junkyard of half-baked ideas. I’ve got a few
random documents with scraps and pieces and a paragraph that might grow into an
idea. But working on books is taking up more of my time. There’s more stuff in
early stages of completion that I haven’t seen through to the end … back when I
was doing a post a week and really diligently doing a post a week I feel like
anywhere from, if I was in a real rush on a Tuesday night like an hour or two,
to something I could poke at for hours and hours.

Between
the feedback that you’ve gotten for your book and on your blog, is there any
feedback that stands out to you? Any favorite things that readers have said?

I think the most meaningful feedback I ever got was, it was
the fifth or sixth post on the blog called, “What it feels like to be bad at
math,” which was just an essay about a math class that I struggled in. That was
sort of the first post from the blog that went a little bit viral and started
getting passed around on Facebook and … an editor at Slate was really nice and saw it and asked
if I wanted to have it reposted at Slate, where it
reached a much wider audience than it would have otherwise. And actually, just
seeing the comments on that, cause almost universally the way people responded
was to share their own story of mathematical struggle … was really cool that
felt like something that I had blundered into, but that piece of writing, which
was sort of hard for me to write, had made it easier for other people to share
the same experience and had kind of unlocked that for people. That was, I
think, much more than a piece full of jokes that makes people laugh — it’s nice
to make people laugh, but there’s a lot of things out there that are funny, and
so having something that, yeah, that opened up a conversation that people
otherwise might not have had about a painful experience that now they were able
to revisit maybe with more sympathy for their own past, struggling self — I
think that was probably for me the most memorable and potent experience of
feedback.

Coming up, do you have anything
in the works? Is there anything to look forward to?

Yeah!
I’ve got a second book, same publisher, coming out called “Change is the Only
Constant,” which is about calculus, so if you liked to read a synthetic
experience, I think that was a couple years ago. I sort of write about calculus
through stories. It has a little bit of a book of lost folklore, anecdotes,
some of them from the history of calculus, some from literature. Authors like
Tolstoy and Borges and Foster Wallace have all drawn on ideas of calculus and
they’re fiction and so kind of weaving together — it’s sort of a humanistic
approach to calculus. But very much in the spirit of the first book.