Recently a highly regarded economist was on a plane working intently on a paper he was going to give at a conference. The paper included equations like these:
His flight was delayed for over two hours because his seatmate thought he was acting suspiciously, maybe writing in a foreign language or in a secret code. So she alerted the authorities just in case, and it took them a while to check the economist out.
I know a lot of people are afraid of math, but I never realized it was this bad.
May 11, 2016
If I were that woman, not able to recognize maths when it’s written in so much gibberish, I’d probably kill myself having made a complete and utter fool of myself by reporting a few vectors and co to the “authorities”. Dear dear. Whatever next? I am so glad my youngest sister gave up studying Chinese as irrelevant to both her interests and life. God knows what might have happened to her doing revision outside Peking and on her flight home.
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The woman didn’t stick around to find out what happened. She got off the plane and booked another fight.
Math anxiety at it’s worst! Maybe if he was sitting in a cafe, scribbling about, it wouldn’t have been such a threat! Planes put us all on edge these days.
Yes!
Ignorance combined with fear and unfamiliarity with a foreign language, the economist was not American, led to this unfortunate incident. The ground security forces also had their moments of doubt, I am told, before the matter could be resolved. What a world we live in.
It’s not that new. I was pulled out of line and interrogated in the London airport about 25 years ago. I had made too many stops and had changed my plans to come home a day or two earlier than I had originally planned. The funniest part was, except for a weekend in St. Andrews where Kaitlin was doing her junior year abroad, I was traveling on a business trip for a national lab. When I told the authorities that they looked at my passport for some verification. Why was the address on my passport so different from where I lived and worked? Because we had been told never to put our correct address down, we might be in serious danger if we were associated with the lab and the plane were hijacked. I thought that part was funny, but the fellows didn’t. They weren’t happy with me but they let me get on the plane.
I saw that article and immediately was transported back to the moment when I first saw that “unfamiliar language” of differential equations. I was probably eleven or twelve, babysitting for the couple who lived behind us. The husband was working at a refinery and studying at a local university with a quite-good engineering and physics department for such a school. After I’d put the children to sleep, I was drawn to his mathematics book (I know, I was a nerd.) It was a handbook of mathematical formulas and integrals. That’s a resource book and not one with lessons, per se. I opened it to this math language and felt I could just almost understand, almost absorb it through my fingertips like braille, something I intuitively felt was beautiful. I spent the rest of the evening paging through pages of differential equations and integrals. Not long after, I was in an advanced class in calculus in high school and then a few years after majoring in physics. That was until I switched to English so I could write! I loved math in part because it’s a universal language, the same throughout the world. Now it’s the reason someone gets kicked off a plane? Strange world. It would have seemed that she would have at least have understood that it was some sort of mathematics. Perhaps she thought it was some sort of calculation for projectile motion, that kind of language, rather than Arabic? That scares me more, that we’re going to be afraid of those who might have knowledge we don’t.
Yes, I love the beauty of equations too. I also majored in physics.
People get totally irrational about terrorism. They report people who are talking a strange language or wearing funny clothes or just being a bit fidgety. If they really think their particular flight is crawling with terrorists, they really need to get a grip and find out the actual odds for a terrorist passenger. About a million to one, I should think.
Apparently the woman had heard if you see something funny, then report it. It worked for her, but not for the other people on the plane.
well.
she obviously never watches ‘ the big bang theory! ‘ Thursdays nights at 7.
physicists who keep an erasable board right there in their apt.
she would have seen that kind of writing a LOT! 🙂
Great point!
can you imagine this woman telling a crowd at her dinner party about the time she made headlines!
when her own fears got the better of her…never mind the fact, she was able to just leave the flight and fly away – safe & anonymous!
It’s not clear she knows how it turned out. She was long gone.