136 lifestyles magazine Winter 2011

Glen Whitney did the math and it didn’t add up (eventually, it added up to more than $22 million and 19,000 square feet, but more on that later). There were already science museums aplenty—

the Exploratorium in San Francisco, the Ontario Science Cen-tre in Toronto, the Alfa Planetarium in Monterrey, Mexico—and, in fact, it’s hard to find a major city without a science center, a natural history museum, or a planetarium.

But one can search the continent in vain for a math mu-seum. There had been one—the Goudreau Museum on Long Island, in the very small town of New Hyde Park, New York—but it was tiny (two small rooms in a community center), and

Profile Glen Whitney

137lifestyles magazineWinter 2011Photo by Michael Nagle/Redux

when Whitney, a longtime Long Islander who had previ-ously visited the place, heard that the Goudreau had been shuttered, he determined to do something about it.

After all, where would science be without math? Or mu-sic, for that matter. Or the checkout line system at Whole Foods (in the course of a brief conversation, Whitney expounds at length on the grocery chain’s application of queuing theory). And so, in 2008, in order to restore math’s honor and situate it in the pantheon of places that parents take their kids to on rainy Sunday afternoons, Whitney de-cided to quit his job and throw himself into the full-time task of creating the Museum of Mathematics, or MoMath as he calls it, relying on his marketer’s ear for funky trun-cation.

He wasn’t always an arithmetical apostle, though his parents’ occupations may have laid the groundwork for his academic inclinations: His father was a battery chem-

ist who worked for Exxon and then Duracell (and, to mix corporate metaphors, this may account for Whitney’s Energizer-like enthusiasm), and his mother was employed with Hughes Corp. as a programmer before leaving to raise Whitney and his two siblings in their home in Ro-selle, New Jersey. Roselle, Whitney points out, is famous for three things: It was the home of Abraham Clark, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence; it was the first village lighted by electricity (Edison’s workshop was a short buggy ride away in West Orange); and, perhaps most impressively, it was the home of the world’s first automatic bowling-pin setter.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN AN uNSTOPPABLE FORCE meets an immovable object? This may be a complex prob-lem for linguistics or logic (the subjects of Whitney’s mas-ter’s and doctoral degrees, respectively), but if the location is a math-based summer camp soccer pitch in Ohio, if the force is an opposing player, and if the object is Glen Whit-ney’s 14-year-old collarbone, the answer is simple: the bone breaks. Indeed, it was while recuperating from just such

Profile Glen Whitney

138 lifestyles magazine Winter 2011

an injury that Whitney turned to a series of problem sets he’d been neglecting, and he found himself entranced.

The math he encountered in his bed was unlike the math he’d been presented with at school. Indeed, the method by which math is traditionally imparted is one of the moti-vating factors driving what Whitney sees as MoMath’s mission, which is, in part, to “attack the fear of math.” He has “great respect” for the work that math teachers do but criticizes what he refers to as “the tyranny of the curricu-lum.” Math, he says, “is about exploration and discovery. It’s constantly evolving. It is about beauty.” These qualities, in Whitney’s view, typically don’t come across in school, where the linear progression from algebra to geometry to trigonometry to calculus obscures the multiple, intersect-ing galaxies of the mathematical universe. Asked what he would change, if given carte blanche to revise the curricu-lum, he says, “I would start by questioning the list of top-ics.” He grants that one can’t avoid arithmetic—the basic learning about numbers—“but where you go from there is really open to question. I would question the canon.”

This fear of math, in Whitney’s view, isn’t merely an aca-demic concern. As an example, he cites the failure of medi-cal patients—and too often of doctors as well—to properly understand the base-rate fallacy: A patient may test posi-tive for a disease; the test is accurate 99 times out of 100. But depending on the incidence of the disease in the popu-lation as a whole, this may mean that the patient has a 1 in 1,000 chance of actually having the disease. Clearly, the misapprehension of this concept can have dire real-world consequences.

Whitney completed his undergraduate and master’s de-grees at Harvard before moving to u.C.L.A. to complete his Ph.D. He spent summers working with the speech recogni-tion group at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center (basically, IBM’s R&D headquarters). He then obtained a teaching post at the university of Michigan, where he spent a few years before being contacted, out of the blue, with a two-line email that said, “Are you the same Glen Whitney who used to work for us at IBM? If so, how would you like to sell out and join our technical trading firm?” It was from a former colleague who had moved over to a hedge fund called Renaissance Technologies ($15 billion under man-agement), which trumpets its adherence to “mathemati-cal and statistical methods.”

For a math maven like Whitney, Renaissance was a good fit; he “sold out” and brought his theoretical training to Wall Street as one of Renaissance’s algorithm managers

(yes, that’s an actual job title).Some hedge funds are based on identifying and assess-

ing the value of individual stocks, some take a broader view of market movements (e.g., across a variety of mar-kets—currencies, commodities, and equities), and some, like Renaissance, rely on sophisticated, computer-run algorithms to identify optimal transaction opportunities. Strictly speaking, Renaissance was then located not on Wall Street but on the campus of Stonybrook university, on Long Island, and Whitney, an avid kayaker and hiker (“I enjoy the sensation of exploring, and to me, that’s what’s wonderful about mathematics”), was able to bike to work.

But after 10 years with the fund, he had developed, he says, “a strong need to feel that what I was doing on a day-to-day basis was positively beneficial to society.” He paus-es, before injecting a somewhat Seinfeldian clarification: “Not that I think that there’s anything wrong with what Renaissance does.”

When asked whether this altruistic impulse has any religious or spiritual basis, he demurs. While he had no involvement in organized religion growing up, he admits to “a deep and abiding belief in the importance of ethics.” Perhaps not surprisingly, he locates this belief in logic, cit-ing game theory—and the famous “prisoner’s dilemma” in particular—to support his view that “everyone should co-operate.” But his passion is hardly fueled by logic alone. “I am in constant awe and wonder,” he declares, “both at the beauty of the physical universe and the abstract universe of math.” And it’s his desire to share these wonders with the public at large that animates his labor of love.

So it was that, in 2008, he left Renaissance with a chunk of change and a goal: to create a museum of mathematics—not two rooms in a community center on Long Island, but an institute worthy of prime Manhattan real estate. Along the way, in order to raise the project’s profile, he began giv-ing walking tours of New York in which he demonstrated practical, everyday applications of math that people might not otherwise notice: the pentagonal shape and counter-directional threading of fire-hydrant lug nuts, for instance, or the spacing between the rings that bind the myriad water towers dotting the dense urban landscape. Now the museum finally has a physical space (the aforemen-tioned 19,000 square feet) at 11 East 26th Street, across from Madison Square Park, and (the aforementioned) $22 million in funding (including $2 million from Google), as well as a projected 2012 opening date. But Whitney still offers tours, and given the ease with which he segues into

139lifestyles magazineWinter 2011Photo by Rob beNNett

detailed discussions of mathematical arcana, it isn’t hard to imagine the zeal he brings to these perambulations.

In addition to the tours and a public presentation series called Math Encounters, he and his team, in anticipation of the museum’s opening, have developed a traveling cir-cus of hands-on exhibits called Math Midway. One of the items is a square-wheeled tricycle that, against expecta-tions, provides a smooth ride due to the precisely cali-brated curvature of the riding surface. His two school-age daughters (the eldest is entering her senior year; Whitney himself is 43) serve as sounding boards for exhibit ideas, though Whitney says that the center of MoMath’s target demographic comprises grades four through eight.

What is his favorite math application? He cites two. First, “that Persi Diaconis figured out how many shuffles it really takes to completely mix up a deck of cards [typi-cally seven], and thereby reinvigorated games like bridge in which oftentimes people were not shuffling enough.” Second is a recently devised mathematical notation to understand and catalog different juggling patterns, which has resulted in the discovery of “entirely new types of jug-gling that had never been used before, and which are now used in juggling performances.”

Whitney doesn’t profess to a planned career trajectory beyond the museum after it becomes operational. “Right now, MoMath fills my entire viewscreen,” he says, “so I can’t really see what’s on the other side.” He’d be happy to be an “ambassador for math” in the Bill Nye vein, but ultimately, he’d “love to help create a global network of institutions de-

voted to informal math learning that can help strengthen all of its members.” Along these lines, when asked whether the Museum of Modern Art (a.k.a. MoMA) has commented on MoMath’s name, Whitney notes that MoMath “has al-ready had the pleasure of the MoMA assistant director for curatorial affairs serving as the introducer for one of our Math Encounters presentations, and that was very suc-cessful. So we welcome further collaboration and interac-tion between our organizations.”

As a final test of his prowess, a series of challenging, math-related questions were put forward to Whitney. His answers are as follows:

Question: If a mathematician were to hang someone ( for crimes against mathemanity, say), would they use a hypotenuse?

Glen Whitney: No—since every hypotenuse is attached to just two legs, that is a very unstable method. And I think most mathematicians would require a very rigorous proof of guilt to go to such a length.

Q: Will MoMath sell bumper stickers or T-shirts that say, “Kiss my asymptote”?

GW: How about “For a good prime, call (555) 793-7319”? Or maybe T-shirts that say, “I do algebra, I do trig, I even do statistics, but graphing is where I draw the line!”

Q: under what circumstances should one try to reason with an irrational number?

GW: If it has angled you into a corner and is showing threatening sines.For more information, visit momath.org.

Profile Glen Whitney

Cindy lawrence, the museum’s Chief of Operations, with Whitney.