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The Calculus of Friendship: What a Teacher and a Student Learned

About Life While Corresponding About Math, by Steven Strogatz

Article in Mathematical Thinking and Learning · January 2012

DOI: 10.1080/10986065.2011.609089

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The Calculus of Friendship: What a

Teacher and a Student Learned About
Life While Corresponding About Math,
by Steven Strogatz
a
Michael N. Fried
a
Ben Gurion University of the Negev

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Student Learned About Life While Corresponding About Math, by Steven Strogatz, Mathematical
Thinking and Learning, 14:1, 81-83

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 Mathematical Thinking and Learning, 14: 81–83, 2012
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DOI: 10.1080/10986065.2011.609089

BOOK REVIEW

Steven Strogatz. The Calculus of Friendship: What a Teacher and a Student Learned About Life
While Corresponding About Math, xii+166 pp. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.
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ISBN 978-0-691-13493-2 (Hardcover). $19.95.

Reviewed by
Michael N. Fried
Ben Gurion University of the Negev

Steven Strogatz’s book The Calculus of Friendship: What a Teacher and a Student Learned
About Life While Corresponding About Math is about all of these things: about teaching, learning,
friendship, and, of course, math. Perhaps I should add “life,” appearing as it does in the title, but
life may in fact be the sum of all the others. I will come back to that. Let me begin by speaking
about math.
This book is a delight for anyone who loves mathematics, and, although this is becoming less
and less self-evident, it seems to me professional mathematics educators, including those whose
research comes nearer to psychology and sociology, should at some level always remain mathe-
matical fanciers. Strogatz, who is Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at
Cornell University, is clearly a man who never lost his own boyish love for mathematics. And
unlike the extroverted mathematician he describes whose extroversion consists in looking at your
shoes when addressing you, Strogatz is a great communicator of mathematics. Even where the
mathematics is old hat, Strogatz√ always manages to add a twist. One finds a lovely geometrical
proof for the irrationality of 2, a derivation of the Binet formula for the Fibonacci sequence
using a shift-operator, an account of the “Monty Hall problem.” My own favorite was Strogatz’s
use of Fourier series to calculate the sum sin1
1
+ sin2
2
+ sin3
2
+ · · ·.
But Strogatz’s book is not meant to be a mere anthology of mathematical gems. The math-
ematics has a context. It is the constant focus of letters between Strogatz and his high school
mathematics teacher, Mr. Joffray, or as he is called always, Joff. It is these letters between a
mathematics teacher and his student that are the true heart of the book. And it is here that, as
a mathematics educator, I found much material to think about. The question running through
the book is: Who is the student and who is the teacher? All too often, we take these roles
to be well-defined: we ask how teachers teach and how learners learn; we ask how teachers
affect their students and how students react to their teachers, and rarely, if ever, do we confuse
the two. Sometimes educational research does recognize a blurring of the borders. Thus, for
 82 BOOK REVIEW

example, in a classic paper (Benne, 1970) on authority in education—authority, which is one of

the chief markers of the distinction between teacher and student—Kenneth Benne speaks of a
dynamic relationship where the authority of a teacher ultimately becomes shared by the student,
as, say, when medical students gradually become doctors alongside the doctors who once taught
them. This kind of discussion, however, is not as common as surely it should be in educational
research.
Joff, by contrast, loved to speak about the students who outpaced him. Strogatz recounts
that Joff, “worshiped some of his former students. He’d tell stories about them, legends that
made them sound like Olympian figures, gods of mathematics” (p. x). More than that, however,
Joff’s questions, challenges, and most of all his letters turned his students into teachers. For at
least two decades, mathematics education has stressed communication skills as one of its goals.
Communication was prominent, for instance, in the NCTM Standards of 1989 and Principles
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and Standards of 2000. But it took reading about Joff and Steve Strogatz to make me realize
that learning to communicate is just learning to teach. Being a good teacher, then, means to turn
oneself into a listener and, just as Joff was able to do, to make one’s students into teachers.
Reflecting on what he learned from Joff, Strogatz says as much explicitly:

While writing this book, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I learned from Joff. For years I would
have said, not much, meaning not much math. That was true even in high school. But I’m starting to
realize what it was that he gave me.
He let me teach him.
Before I had any students, he was my student.
Somehow he knew that’s what I needed most. And he let me, and encouraged me, and helped me.
Like all great teachers do. (p. 142)

With that, I want to return to mathematics, friendship, and life. For communication is also
what powers friendship. But what do friends communicate about? I mean friends in a high
sense, the way Aristotle spoke of friends, human beings who urge one another on to high things.
Besides the mathematics in the letters we have a narrative of two lives, Strogatz’s and Joff’s.
We read about Strogatz’s decision to study mathematics, which he loved, instead of the more
sensible subject of medicine. We find out about a failed first marriage and a successful second
one. We learn about Joff’s musically gifted son Marshall who died tragically at 27, about another
son who suffered and overcame a bout of cancer. We watch as the “outdoorsy” Joff grows old,
suffers a stroke, writes with a shaky hand. Throughout the book, Strogatz rues not writing about
these things in his letters to Joff. Their letters never drift far from mathematics. Even so, Strogatz
brings these personal narratives into his mathematical titles: “irrationality,” “shifts,” “chaos,” and
“bifurcations” are all clever double entendres.
Yet, in a way, I think they may be too clever. They give the impression that mathematics is
human only if it can be a vehicle to speak about marriage, sickness, or tragedy. When Joff and
Strogatz communicate about mathematics, they are communicating about mathematics; there is
no subtext. But when they write about mathematics they are living a life that is a true human
life, not a mere biological life. And keeping one another turned toward things more elevated than
sickness, they are acting as true friends. It is no accident that the words that end the book are
Joff’s “I love you, Steve.”
Although this is not a book about research in mathematics education, I think it is a book every
mathematics educator should read. It reminds us that as educators we may be glad if students
 BOOK REVIEW 83

come to possess certain skills or even become eventually professional mathematicians; however,
our main goal is that our students become a certain kind of person. We should hope that our
students will become capable of a friendship that goes beyond drinking in a pub and talking
about the price of fuel. Mathematics is a high thing, and it is one of the things that can make a
high life.

REFERENCE

Benne, K. D. (1970). Authority in education. Harvard Educational Review, 40, 385–410.

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