Lex Fridman: I'm going to invent a time machine

i uh grew up in the soviet union and uh fell in love with math early i was forced into math early and fell in love through force that's good well that you fell in love with other people well but there uh something we talked about a little bit is there such a value for excellence uh it's competitive and it's also everybody kind of looks up the the definition of success is being in a particular class is you know being really good at it um and like it's not improving it's like being really good i mean we are much more like that with sports for example we're not it's like it's understood you know you're going to star on the basketball team if uh you're gonna start on the basketball team if you're going to be better than the other guys the other girls on the team uh so that coupled with the belief this could be partially a communist belief i don't know but the belief that everybody is capable of being great but if you're not great that's your fault and you need to work harder and i remember i had a sense that um probably delusional but i could win a nobel prize i don't even know what that entails um but i thought um like uh my dad early on told me just off hand and it always stuck with me that if you if you can figure out how to build a time machine how to travel back in time it will probably give you a nobel prize and i remember early in my life thinking i'm going to invent the time machine and like like the tools of mathematics were in service of that dream of winning the nobel prize and it's silly i didn't really think in those concrete terms but i just thought i could be great feeling and then then when you struggle the belief that you could be great is like struggle is good that right pushes you on yeah and so the other thing about the soviet system that might love to hear your comments about is just the sheer like hours of math like the number of courses you're talking about a lot of geometry a lot more i think in the american system you take maybe one year of geometry and high school yeah in high school first of all geometry is beautiful it's visual and then you get to reason through proofs and stuff like that in in russia i remember just being nailed over and over with you it was just non-stop and then of course there's different perspectives on calculus and just the whole the sense was that math is like like fundamental to the development of the human mind so math but also science and literature by the way was also hit very hard like we read a lot of serious adult stuff america does that a little bit too they challenge young adults with good literature but they don't challenge adults very much with math so those two things um valuing excellence and just a lot of math in the curriculum do you think do you think do you find that interesting because it seems to have been successful yeah i think that's very interesting and there is a lot of success people coming through the soviet system i think something that's very different to the us and other countries in the world is that idea that excellence is important and you can get there if you work hard in the u.s there's an idea that excellence is important but then kids are given the idea in many ways that you can either do it or you're one of the people who can't so many students in the school system think they're one of the kids who can't so there's no point in trying hard because you're never going to get there so if you can switch that idea it would be huge and it seems from what you've said that in the uh in the uh soviet union that idea is really different now the downside of that idea that anybody can get there if you work hard is that thought that if you're not getting there it's your fault and i i would add something into that i would say that anybody can get there but they they need to work hard and they also need good teaching because there are some people who really can't get there because they're not given access to that good teaching so but that would be huge that change as to doing lots of maths if um if maths was interesting and open and creative and multi-dimensional i would be all for it we we actually run summer camps at stanford where we invite kids in and we give them this maths that i love and the in our camp classrooms they were three hours long and when we were planning the teachers were like three hours are we gonna be able to keep the kids excited for three hours turned out they didn't want to go to break or lunch they'd be so into these mathematical patterns we couldn't stop them it was amazing so yeah if maths was more like that then i think having more of it would be a really good thing so what uh what age are you talking about is there um could you comment on what age is like the most important when people quit math or give up on themselves or on math in general and uh perhaps that age or something earlier is really a important moment for them to discover to be inspired to discover the magic of math i think a lot of kids start to give up on themselves and maths around from about fifth grade and then those middle school years are really important and fifth grade can be pivotal for kids just because they're allowed to explore and think in good ways in the early grades of elementary school but fifth grade teachers are often like okay we're going to prepare you now for middle school and we're going to give you grades and lots of tests and that's when kids start to feel really badly about themselves and so middle school years we our camps are middle school students we think of those years as really pivotal many kids in in those years are deciding yes i'm gonna keep going with stem subjects or no i'm not that this isn't for me so i mean all years are important and in all years you can kind of switch kids and get them on a different pathway but i think those middle school years are really important you

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Id: kAO1RFLbCB4

Length: 7min 0sec (420 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 02 2021