THE ECENTRICITIES OF VALUES: A SYSTEMS ANALYST, RUSSIAN MATHEMATICIAN, AND POINCARE'S CONJECTURE!

THE ECENTRICITIES OF VALUES: A SYSTEMS ANALYST, RUSSIAN MATHEMATICIAN, AND POINCARE’S CONJECTURE!

James R. Fisher Jr., Ph.D.
© July 6, 2010

* * *

What do you value most? Your life? Your family? Your profession? Your freedom? Yourself?

This is not a mutually exclusive list. It is a touchstone for what is valued.

Once you have answered that, the next question is to ask yourself the why of such valuing. When you do that you will come in touch with your cognitive biases.

* * *

What we think we value, what we think we cherish, what we think is important to us is a smorgasbord of inculcated values that have been handed down to us from generation to generation through our parents and authority figures.

Society in general and our family in particular has certain accepted cultural and religious beliefs, which we internalized as we grow as if by osmosis. The point is we are not ourselves but the many, valuing what in our time and place and space is considered desirable.

If we vary from this eclectic collection, even slightly, we are apt to be punished or considered eccentric. It is difficult if not impossible for us to fathom anyone thinking differently or believing differently much less valuing differently than we do.

This is how we have been programmed. This is considered by us to be the unwritten law when it comes to values.

There are clashes of values in this context because the time and place and space of an eighty-year-old are different from that of a sixty-year-old is different from a twenty-year-old. Each has entered a different value system with differing cognitive biases, and therefore different values.

* * *

We don’t like the suggestion that we are robotic. We like to think we are individuals with individual consciences, individual free wills and individual values. The evidence suggests otherwise. Most of us toll the invisible value line we suspect to be there from birth to death.

That is why any departure from normative values is always surprising. When you look at individuals who cross this invisible line more closely, you find they behave pretty much as we all do only in their own idiosyncratic jungle.

They can be Hippies or Yuppies, baby boomers or spoiled brats of the “x” or “y” generation, gang members or terrorists, off-the-wall novelists or corporate executives.

Despite these significant departures from normative values, within these structures, pecking order exist not unlike the ones they so despise. Ergo, should members vary from these new normative values, they are likely to be punished, which includes possible ostracism, demotion, eviction, or even annihilation.

* * *

People reading this have likely, at one time or another in their lives, bounced against the value wall, having had to collect themselves to go forward. It is called “life.”

* * *

WHAT YOU VALUE IS NOT NECESSARILY WHAT YOU SEE

When I was in the human engineering business, I had occasion to spend a great deal of time with brilliant people. I discovered that even these special people if they varied a little from the norm, suffered greatly.

There was this one systems analyst. He seldom left his desk. He would tap away with his pencil on the desk of his cubicle, whistling some tune while chain-smoking cigarettes enveloped in a cloud of thought.

His supervisor, a graduate mechanical engineer, gravitated to this management position without previous contact with this group. For what he took to be a lackadaisical work ethic, he singled out these particular systems analysts for a poor performance appraisal, and downgraded his skill level. This meant a significant reduction in income. If this were not enough, the supervisor warned him if he didn’t shape up he’d be gone.

* * *

Word spread of this evaluation within the hour. Systems analysts are mainly mathematicians with little inclination to social or political nuances associated with the wider culture.

Not only did they feel blindsided, but one of their most productive members was singled out for punishment, punishment they felt was not justified. So, they did the only thing they knew how to do. They refused to work.

This stopped work in its tracks on a $100 million proposal. Time was of the essence. This brought top management into the mix. That is when I was asked to find out what was going on and why.

* * *

We were able to satisfy the systems analysts by persuading management to reassign the supervisor and appoint one of their own to take his place. Normalcy returned almost as quickly as chaos had occurred.

* * *

The analyst in question was interviewed. It was clear he didn’t see himself as outside the norm, disruptive or rebellious, didn’t even see himself as especially important, but did feel he knew what made his brain work.

I asked him, “Are you surprised how your colleagues rallied around you?”

He thought for a minute. “Yes and no.”

“Yes and no?”

“Yes, we are a rather peculiar lot. So, I think they could identify with me. But no, I didn’t think any of them had the guts to take a stand.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, mainly because they have wives and families, or girlfriends or boyfriends, and then there is the pride of the profession, something I’ve never developed.”

“How about you?”

“You see that Harley-Davidson sitting out there?”

“Yes.”

“That’s pretty much my identity. I don’t actually have a permanent home, I crash here and there, no girlfriend. Women think I drink and smoke too much, and they can only stand me for a night or two. The job is about the only thing that is real to me, if you get my meaning.”

I didn’t exactly, but nodded that I did. “So you like your work.”

He looked at me as if I were an idiot. “I just said that.”

“What do you like about it?”

He shook his head. Clearly, he was losing his patience with me. “Mathematics, especially our kind is like a labyrinth. It’s not straightforward. I like to get inside this and find the simplest path through it.”

I just nodded because I had no idea what he was talking about but was sure he did. “Could you put that more on my level?”

“What I’m saying is that I don’t get thrown off track by all the panic. It doesn’t speed up the problem solving for sure, and it gets in the way of our work. My colleagues worry about bosses. They don’t understand them. I think their work suffers for this. I don’t have the time or mind for that. I’m like a goalie in hockey. I want control of the pitch.”

“Do you think you’re gifted?”

“What a stupid question. That is definitely the question of an outsider.” He shrugs his shoulders. “The answer is no, but the question has little relevance. I’m not as smart as the dumbest guy on this program. Does that answer you?”

“They don’t think so.”

“That’s because they listen to people like you, and are too busy being smart.”

“Then if you’re not smart what are you, clever?”

“I’ll accept that if you mean I don’t get steamrolled or sidetracked on what I’m trying to do.”

“Do you think you're cunning?"

He breaks into laughter. “No, I won’t accept that. If I were cunning, I wouldn’t have gotten myself into the mess I’m in. I would have seen it coming.”

“How do you feel about the boss who was going to demote you?”

“Nothing. He was out of his depth through no fault of his own and didn’t know it. I don’t blame him. I blame the people that put him in that predicament.”

“That’s pretty negative.”

“No, I disagree. I think it’s honest.”

“Is it because he’s a mechanical engineer and not a systems analyst?”

He thought for a minute. “No, I don’t think it’s that. He believes too much in the claptrap he’s been fed. That's all.”

“Expand on that.”

“He thinks managing us means he must intrude on us in our world, a world he doesn’t know has no interest in knowing but is trying to do a job that has nothing to do with what we are doing, and therefore is counterproductive.”

“Then what is his job?”

“It is to serve and protect us so we can do our job the same way cops do. Cops don’t have the foggiest notion of what most citizens are charged to do, but they do know how to serve and protect citizens.”

“You’re not like everybody else, is that what you’re saying?”

“We’re not. We work in our heads. We don’t run around like squirrels jumping from this to that. We’re a bunch of oddballs who happen to have a role in this company.”

“You’re new supervisor is one of you and he doesn’t think he’s an oddball.”

He laughs. “He’s quite a politician. He talked you into giving him the old supervisor’s job, didn’t he?”

“Not me. Management.”

“Whatever. It figures.”

“Why?”

“Well, he understands us but he’s not really one of us. He wants to be like guys like you, the suits with clipboards. He wants status.”

“How is that?”

“Let me put it this way. If you’re in France, and you know the language, it doesn’t make you a Frenchman. That is because you don’t know the nuances of the language. Our former supervisor knows engineering and mathematics, but he doesn’t know the nuances of our work. Our new supervisor does because he is the equivalent of the bona fide Frenchman.”

“So you think he’ll work out.”

“Yes, I’m sure he will. He won’t get in our way. He knows the perimeters of his depth.”

“Will you take advantage of him?”

He looked at me with disgust. “I’m not sure you get anything I’m saying. Why would you say that?”

“I don’t know. It just came into my head.”

“Well, it just shows how stupid you are.”

“Point taken.”

Now, more consoling. “We’re not trying to get ahead of anybody. We’re just trying to do a job. Like anything else, some of us are better at some things than others. I don’t know a single one of us that would be comfortable in any other discipline.”

“Thank you for being so candid.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Yes.”

He looks at me hard smoking his cigarette, and then says, “Forget it.”

* * *

GRIGORY PERELMEN AND THE POINCARE CONJECTURE

The systems analyst episode came to mind as I was thinking of the brilliant Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman who solved the Poincare Conjecture that had stumped mathematicians for over one hundred years, and then rejected the prize.

* * *

The Poincare Conjecture is a theorem about the characterization of the three-dimensional sphere among three-dimensional manifolds. The claim concerns a space that locally looks like ordinary three-dimensional space but is connected, finite in size, and lacks any boundary (a closed 3-manifold).

The Poincare Conjecture claims that if such a space has the additional property that each loop in the space can be continuously tightened to a point, then it is necessarily a three-dimensional sphere.

Three months ago, Grigory Perelman, an impoverished Russian mathematician, was awarded the prestigious $1 million Clay Mathematical Institute Millennium Prize. He won it for his groundbreaking work solving the problem of Poincare’s three-dimensional geometry. This has been a problem that has resisted mathematicians since 1904, the time when Einstein was publishing his great discoveries in relativity.

Perelman, 43, lives in a bare-bones apartment in St. Petersburg, Russia with his elderly mother. Despite his situation, the mathematician has refused the prize claiming he doesn’t deserve it as he simply followed the mathematical path set by others.

* * *

My first thought was I wonder how his mother feels seeing an opportunity to raise their standard of living, but of course I don’t know that. I sense that she knows her son, respects him, and accepts his decision. The committee plans to use the prize money to benefit mathematicians. Like poets, mathematicians are known to live in relative poverty in pursuit of their passions.

Yet, it must perplex the general reader, and I use that term advisedly, to see an impoverish person look the gift horse in the mouth, and say, “Thank you, but no thanks.”

* * *

The second thought I had, based on my own experience, was that Perelman was protecting his integrity. He could not allow his talent to be corrupted by a prize. In my own case, I’ve often said God blessed me seeing that I was born into a lower middleclass household where there was no safety net, no fall back position, and that I succeeded or failed on my own. What freedom such a situation allows.

There is an invisible line in the mind called the conscience that guides those who would listen, a line that protects their integrity by allowing the freedom of their passions to thrive. Nothing is allowed to cross that line, as they never forget that it is there.


* * *

A productive life is not a matter of progress, kudos or accolades but the unraveling of the mysteries that challenge consciousness. Failures, set backs, disappointments, false steps, and blind alleys are accepted as the normal course of daily wonderings.

Circumstances forced this man out of his sanctuary by awarding him this prize. Now one wonders if he will be able to retreat back into the sanctuary of his creative freedom. Einstein couldn't. His creative work essentially ended in 1904 – 1905, and like the light beam he fantasized riding, instead road his celebrity for the rest of his life.

Perelman’s 43 years of life have been by choice mainly those of the outsider. He writes:

“To put it short, the main reason is my disagreement with the organized mathematical community. I don’t like their decisions. I consider them unjust.”

This is the perennial sentiment of the outsider where bureaucracy, pyramid climbing, backstabbing, plagiarism, and personality assassination do not exist, and therefore do not impinge creativity. Brilliant minds are as vulnerable to this malady as low life. Perelman will have none of it.

* * *

Struggle is something he knows and something he embraces. As a consequence, and he is right about this, winning the prize singled him out when he had actually walked on the shoulders of giants. He learned from them and took that learning and personalized it to be his own, knowing all the time it never belonged exclusively to him.

As a plagiarist steals passages and often ideas from another writer, and rewrites them to give him a sense that it is his own, Perelman knew his insights on the path to mathematical discovery did not belong to him alone, but to humanity, that there was no reason to pull him off the path and make him distinct from other mathematicians.

My sense is that he suspected that by doing that it might kill his creative passion at such a young age. He knew perhaps without knowing it that the prize was tantamount to an anathema, that it might derail him from everything that he had pursued and hope to pursue.

It is also apparent that he didn’t attempt to solve the Poincare Conjecture to satisfy an ambition but rather for the pure pleasure of the journey. It was a puzzle out there as tempting as the siren on the bow of a ship, always beyond his reach. When finally grasped, it proved unsettling to have the conundrum lead to icon status. This was not what he was or needed.

* * *

It is perhaps hard for the reader to imagine, as I am outlining here in conjecture, that a brilliant mind can be a simple mind. Brilliance more often than not resides in simplicity personified.

The moment that a brilliant but simple mind is seduced by accolades and becomes celebrity it loses its identity, drive and energy to become all that it could become.

John Forbes Nash, a brilliant economist and mathematician, whose work in game theory won him the Nobel Prize (1994), retreated into paranoid schizophrenia from the pressure of celebrity. He is the subject of the film, “A Beautiful Mind” (2001), which illustrates the clash that can occur between brilliance and simplicity.

A film may be made of Perelman, but if so, I hope the filmmaker doesn't cheat. Perelman appears to be the best that is in us, and the best we can be. He is that because he apparently knows and understands what is in play and what is valuable. He epitomizes the eccentricities of values.

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