Bryden Cais says math makes him feel much better about life.
Cais, a number theorist and assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Arizona, said he is often disappointed in real-life situations when what he optimistically assumes to be true is shown to be otherwise.
âMath is the exact opposite. Whenever your assumptions turn out to be wrong, itâs because the way things actually work is far more beautiful and deeply surprising.â
Conveying that surprising beauty can be a chore. Cais said a handful of people are really good at it â such as Jordan Ellenberg, a math professor at the University of Wisconsin who is speaking Monday at the UAâs Gallagher Theater.
The title of the talk is âHow to use math to get rich in the lottery.*â
Note the asterisk (and the grammatical difficulty of dealing with punctuation when an asterisk is involved), which alerts you to a disclaimer: âwill not actually help you get rich in the lottery.â
Cais said Ellenberg, who writes the âDo the Mathâ column for the online magazine Slate, is âa very talented number theorist in an area of pure mathematics.
âThe one thing that makes him unique among mathematicians is heâs written a couple of best-selling books.â
Ellenbergâs most recent book, âHow Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking,â contains the tale of a group of MIT math students who figured out how to reliably win money in the Massachusetts lottery.
Lottery rules have since been revised to prevent the studentsâ stratagem from working. Hence, the asterisk.
Cais said Ellenberg is âa very engaging and highly amusing speaker. Iâve always enjoyed his talks, and this one is being pitched to a very broad audience.â
Ellenbergâs free talk, at 6:30 p.m. in the Gallagher Theater inside the UA Student Union, is the ninth in the Daniel Bartlett Memorial Lecture series. It honors Bartlett, a UA mathematician who died of sudden cardiac failure in 2006.
