How math saved my life | Jason Padgett

said he'd a clicker here sorry about that I didn't get it clicker sorry thank you unless you count lunch and recess I was one of those kids that did not care for school or for studying when I was younger and as I grew older my interest in school math in particular was completely non-existent when I was in high school I sported this absolutely terrible mullet spike haircut and I had friends that would literally let me copy all of their homework math science mythology I literally had help with all of it and I remember it was my second senior year or my second because I skipped so much school the first year I couldn't pass and so during the second year I had taken the exact amount of credits I needed to graduate so long as I actually passed the classes I would graduate well in this pathology class we had a collage that we all had to turn in and you could not pass this class unless you did the collage well the whole semester goes by and I of course hadn't even started my collage and elastic comes and the teacher says everybody turn in your collage and I panicked realizing I'm going to have a third senior year because I haven't even started this and then my best friend Larry Imhoff walked up and he said Jason do I know you better than anybody and I said yes why he goes cuz I knew you wouldn't do your homework and you wouldn't graduate so I did two collages so that you could and he gives me a second collage and to this day that's the reason I graduated and the kicker is that the claws that he did for me I got an a-minus on the collage he did for himself he got a B+ yeah and we still laugh about it to this day well after graduation life continued on like one big spring break I mean we would go out to bars and party nightly and having bad hair and working out was literally a priority for me at the time as long as we could party chase girls and goof off which we definitely did a lot of things seemed good life seemed good relative to what I knew then of course but it still seemed good my life was maybe a mile wide but it was only an inch deep and before I knew it over ten years had gone by and I was still living in the exact same way well then in 2002 life took a dramatically different turn but it started off like many other nights with me going to a karaoke bar with some friends they have my friend Angela was on a first date and they had too much to drink and they needed a ride home so I went to pick them up I wound up singing a song and I had a coke paid the bill and left well unbeknownst to us there was two thugs there that would get tipped off by a server as to who had cash and they would attack and rob you when you left so as we leave this bar I was attacked from behind from my perspective I didn't see anything at all I just heard and felt this deep thud in the back as something smashed into the back of my head and I saw this flash of light similar to what you hear boxers described when they get knocked out and the next thing I knew I was on my knees just getting pummeled you know from all different directions well I remember having this feeling that I was going to die right then and right there and I then had the next fuel and I had was this strange acceptance that life was about to end and then this fight-or-flight instinct came on and I had no chance to flee so I fought and I pulled out my absolute best jujitsu moves that idler when I was younger it's called biting somebody on the leg and that's what I did I grabbed this guy's leg and I bit him on the inside of the thigh just as hard as I could but he was wearing these big baggy pants and all I got was fabric and I cracked my front teeth and as I was trying to bite him his friend just kept kicking me in the head in the back repeatedly until finally he said give me your goddamn jacket and I threw my jacket off rolled away and they took it and took off well my friend Angela took me to the hospital which was luckily right across the street and I was diagnosed with a concussion and a bruised kidney and they gave me this really powerful narcotic pain shot and sent me home and I remember on the way home thinking how strange everything looked well the next day when I woke up it was obvious the pain meds were not the cause of what was making everything look so strange when things moved they moved in these bizarre stop-action frames like individual discrete picture frames with a line connecting them and bright light seemed somehow amplified and the jagged edges of these picture frames made these beautiful and elegant patterns as things moved and I was absolutely entranced and mesmerised by the fact that this must be how our brain constructs a moving image just like a video camera with individual discrete pictures helped excuse me having a brain injury sometimes causes memory issues here there we go well anyway our brains normally smooth out these frames and I remember looking at my hand and trying to draw what I saw and I literally drew hundreds of pictures and I just have a few of them here for you today and I remember looking at my hand and it was literally like looking at it for the first time if you look at it here may look smooth from a distance but when you zoom in closer you see that it's really not smooth it's made from all of these tiny straight lines and as it turns out there is mathematics to describe this it's called the polar integral but at the time all I knew was that the smoothness or the fluidity of motion was gone and I would look at my hand and I would move it back and forth faster and slower and as I moved it faster the picture frames were farther apart and as I moved it slower the picture frames were closer together and I wondered how could I not have seen this before and then I thought how can I effectively describe this to somebody else and then the last question I had was as do I dare even tell anybody about this at all well eventually obviously I tried I started to talk about it and a good way for me to explain it is to imagine you're watching television and you know how on television you can see frame by frame by frame well the way I see is like that only in real time and I noticed it gave everything this slightly pixelated or grid like quality well then one day my little daughter Megan who was born during my wild years she asked me how the television worked I said little rectangle pixels they change color and as they change color that changes the picture well right as I said that a kershel came on with a big o and you know how kids sometimes see right to the core of a problem she said dad that's impossible how do you make a circle with rectangles and it was like a door in my mind that I had never opened opened up and I walked through it and realized you can't you can make the pixels half that size and half that size all the way to infinity but the edge of the circle will always be a zigzag even though the resolution gets finer in other words perfect circles literally don't exist it was a day I will never forget a moment that I realized that I could understand things that I never thought I could and more than anything I wanted to share this but there was also some serious negative side effects that came with this I developed agoraphobia OCD post-traumatic stress and I literally locked myself away in my house and would not leave unless I had to get something absolutely essential I had blankets covering the windows that not a beam of light could get into the house and this self-imposed isolation went on for over three years until one day I ran out of food and I actually had to leave the house and so I went to the mall and I had a sandwich and while I was there I was drawing and I ran into a physicist and we started talking and I found that as we were talking we were talking about similar things but just in two different ways for instance what he would talk about PI he would say things like f of the X and big squeeze theorem but when I talked about PI what I saw was something similar to the pixel analogy I saw a shape that was forever getting smoother and smoother and smoother as you sliced it into smaller slices and it would forever approach a circle but never reach it or when he would talk about square roots or exponents for instance eight to the third power he could be talking about eight times eight times 8 which is 512 but what I saw was literally a cube that it was composed of smaller and smaller cubes and this cube you can see it has eight cubes on each side and you square those 8 into 64 and you stack those 64 eight high and you get 512 so 8 to the third power and this drawing are literally one and the same thing or when you would talk to me about fusion he could be talking about things like this where is what I talked about fusion and what I saw was this a geometric timed implosion that would get the atoms close enough together so that they could fuse well he gave me the best advice of my life that day when he said maybe you should go back to school and try to learn traditional mathematics so you can say this in a language that we all understand and that's what I did I went and I enrolled in math 99 algebra 1 at Tacoma Community College and I was blown away the first day where my teacher Tracey Haney graphed an equation and I said you mean all these equations can be grafted to a shape and she said yes and I said Wow then we are talking about the same thing but just in two different ways and from that day I was completely hooked I would find myself in the math lab for hours and months at a time trying to absorb all this incredible beautiful knowledge that I had completely ignored previously in my life well then one day I was in the math lab and a friend that I had talked to came in all excited and he said they were studying interference patterns and when he showed me these a feather could have knocked me over because the interference patterns were identical to many of my drawings here we have actual interference patterns and a drawing of a factor that I drew and it gave me this great feeling that I was on the right track I didn't want to be that crazy guy who thought he saw a math everywhere but really didn't and so it gave me this feeling that yes I was on the right track and and learning the right way well then shortly after that I was in the cafeteria at school sitting at a table drawing and I ran into this beautiful woman and as we started talking I managed to get a conversation going with her and I talked about typical things that guys do like pie and relativity and drawing and somehow managed to get her interested in talking to me and as we talked she said what a lot of people had told me she said when you show me the drawings and you say this in laymen terms it makes the concept really easy to understand and she said I wish I would have learned it that way before I took these math classes so the concept would have been embedded first well that woman she inspired me to get out of the house and try to change the world and a positive and meaningful way and so that is my mission to try to inspire students to try to help create scientists and that beautiful woman that I met that day that inspired me to get of the house she is now my wife and we just had a beautiful baby girl and because of them and because of this attack and because of mathematics life couldn't be any better thank you so much

Channel: TED Archive

Views: 146,855

Rating: 4.9187226 out of 5

Keywords: math, brain, education, youth, creativity, science, Jason Padgett, TED Archive

Id: GDU7lEmiiD8

Length: 13min 19sec (799 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 01 2016