Not a lot of people understand the difference between pure and applied maths. Well, not a lot of people care, but bear with me.

Here’s an analogy: Suppose that you toss a ball into the air. It goes up and down in the shape of a parabola. So you head to the physicist and you ask him to model this for you. Using what he knows about gravity, velocity, and acceleration, he writes down a formula — it’s a quadratic equation. Let’s say that he even solves this equation, by a computer, by hand, whatever.

Now the applied mathematician sees all this going on and says, well gee, that’s an interesting equation. I wonder what happens to the ‘2′ in the equation if I change it to a ‘3′. Of course, by turning that ‘2′ into a ‘3′, the mathematician might be removing the physical ‘correctedness’ of the model, but who cares. After all, it’s the maths which entertain him. Not the physics.

Now this abstraction process continues. The mathematicians start turning those 3s to 4s. Then 4s to 5s. Then suddenly, the goal is to solve that problem for any choice of number ‘N’. Of course, now that the equation has been mucked about so much, nobody has any clue what it all means. It’s just interesting mathematics, you see.

For the Pure mathematician, the physical motivation of their work has been lost through decades of abstraction. Mathematicians just keep on abstracting and abstracting, unifying these concepts while ditching those, changing variables and making everything airtight. Most of these people don’t know what’s the physical applications of what they do. They’re like children stuck in a grown-up’s world. Everyone’s busy worrying about salaries and jobs and careers, and they just want to have some fun.

Here’s a clip from the not-so-well-known 1980s movie, It’s My Turn. According to IMDB, the movie is about “a successful but stressed mathematics professor who goes to her father’s wedding and falls in love. But then — duh duh duuuh — she must choose between him and her current boyfriend, between Chicago and New York, and between research and administration.

Dear lord. Somehow, I doubt any of you are going to be flying off to your nearest Blockbuster to rent this. But do watch this clip.

By the way, this isn’t a parody of real life. I’ve actually taught uber-obnoxious lanky mathematicians with bad hair and intellectual issues just like that guy. And the teacher’s parting shot? Classic.

But the point I want to make is the following: Do you think anybody in that class knows what the fuck that stuff is good for? Of course not.

Half of them have no idea what’s going on. A quarter are seriously considering dropping this course — now that they’ve realised the professor probably isn’t going to put out. And the other quarter? For the other quarter, it’s all a game. A game of symbols and relations and unity and structure.

These words she mentions: kernels, cokernel, groups, cohomology, … these words did have some physical meaning at some point. Perhaps. But certainly not anymore. Now, they’re just definitions. You might as well replace all the words with ‘bippity-bonk’, ’scooby-doo’, and ‘chuppity-chink’. It’d sound a lot funnier and it’d probably mean the same — at least to three quarters of the class.

Is this something you can spend your life doing?

There’s this thing where a British (or comparable) person is complaining about the weather.

“Bruv, it’s minus two bleedin’ degrees, ‘innit?” they’d say.

At this point, the Canadian would jump in.

“That’s nothing, dude. It’s minus thirty degrees here, eh?”.

Let me sort this out. As someone who’s recently been to both countries, I can say with absolutely certainty (in the social-scientific sense) that -3 degrees in London is just as cold as -30 degrees in Ottawa.

There’s some psychological factor in play — and since every ‘maladise’ in Psychology has a name, let me lay stake to this one and call it the Trinhian Cold-Factor (notice the odd placement of the ‘h’), or the TC-Factor. The TC-Factor says that the dominant contributor to one’s actual feelings of numbness primarily derives from one’s expectation of potential numbness.

So for example, when I’m in Canada during the winter, I’m expecting to have to deal with -20 degrees weather. Thus, anything lower is felt as cold. Anything higher is warm.

Immediately, I jump on a plane to Britain. I arrive expecting 10 degree weather, and instead I’m confronted with -3 degree weather. Hence I am now cold. It doesn’t actually matter what the temperature is.

This of course, like all Psychological studies, has been backed up with real, honest-to-God statistics and unbiased sampling (i.e. me).

Thus, it has nothing to do with Canadians being tougher than the rest of the world. We need to stop acting like we’re tougher. We’re not.

What we are, however, is a morosely pessimistic country.

Because the worst we expect, the better we feel.

That’s why so many people are unwilling to move to Canada, see? It’s not they they can’t handle it physically. It’s that they simply cannot imagine being in a circumstance for which they have to wake up each and every day, and then look forward to that fantastic feeling of stepping outside in the morning, only to have their snot suddenly and seemingly inexplicably crystallize in their nose.