On the Golden Rule of Chalkboards

I love writing on chalkboards. It seems to bridge a gap between what goes on in my mind and what I am trying to convey. I struggle with pen to paper, and I have tried many methods. With the right tools, space, and audience, it is a liberating feeling. But it seems the act itself appears to be locked in an ivory tower, far beyond the inaccessible. I want to dispel that idea here with a short story.

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Before I started my undergrad, I found myself in a meeting room at Fermilab in Batavia, IL. I had joined an architectural drawing group and we spent the day doing just that — though I found myself wandering and hoping someone would whisk me away into the annals of scientific history; a veritable Hardy-Steinhaus to my Ramanujan-Banach. That did not happen, but there I was, moments before leaving for the day, mediocre drawings in hand, in front of a chalkboard covered in indecipherable explanations of the foundations of the Universe. I was compelled to make my mark. At the time, the most profound thing I could conjure was this:

At the time, I didn’t know this was the first seven terms of Pascal’s Triangle as a height graph. Note the optical illusion around the fifth and sixth terms. An open question (for me, at least) is whether or not that occurs anywhere else.

It felt like I was breaking the supposed Golden Rule of Chalkboards:

Only someone with more experience or something meaningful to present is allowed to write something on the Board.

I remember a very distinct fear that a bespectacled, Hardy-Steinhaus character in a lab coat would burst into the room, flailing as they rushed to see what I had ruined, “how dare you?” they demand. Scorned and forevermore exiled from the annals of scientific history, I cower and erase my contribution to the sciences. That did not actually happen, but in a way, it kind of had. It was me. I had essentially exiled myself.

Will gets chased off by Prof. Lambeau. Good Will Hunting, Directed by Gus Van Sant, 1997

Years later (and only a few months ago), I was watching a video of mathematician Michael Penn. He’s explaining some topic in algebra or analysis — I forget what — and a child comes up to the board to draw something below his very serious mathematics. Instead of scolding her as my nightmare Hardy-Steinhaus would, he gently tells says something to the effect of, “now is not the right time.” Of course, I’m filling in some blanks here. I don’t know what he said, but seeing how he responded reminded me of that day in the Fermilab meeting room. That’s what I took from it and it healed a part of me.

Nonetheless, I do not know if my drawing lit the bulb of inspiration for my would-be Hardy-Steinhaus or if anyone who saw it chalked it up to child’s play. That is okay, because there is nothing wrong with curiosity and there is no Golden Rule of Chalkboards.

This is the beginning of a series on how I am making sense of my identity as a mathematician.