Featured Contributors
Meet the Editor — Jørgen Veisdal
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This interview is part of a series of stories featuring some of the personalities writing for Cantor’s Paradise.
Who Are You?
My name is Jørgen Veisdal and I am a 31-year-old writer and researcher from Stavanger, Norway.
What Do You Do For a Living?
I am a research fellow on the Faculty of Economics and Management at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway.
Prior to starting my Ph.D, I co-founded a technology company called Moon Labs which was later acquired by Disruptive Technologies. I’ve also worked for various other start-ups, both as an industrial designer and as a business developer.
How Did You Become Interested in Mathematics?
I had a fairly odd college experience. Living across country from everyone I knew, I attended a small engineering school for industrial design. While there in addition to my college studies I also picked up an interest in mathematics — specifically, the Riemann zeta function. Because I spent so much time studying it, eventually I figured that I might as well do an extra undergraduate degree in math. My thesis was on the same topic, entitled ‘Prime Numbers and the Riemann Zeta Function’ in 2013. About three years later, in 2016, I spent a few days rewriting it for a wider audience and published it on Medium under the title ‘The Riemann Hypothesis, explained’. That’s how this all started.
I’m proud to say, that story remains one of the most read stories in Cantor’s Paradise, at over a quarter of a million views as of 2020. The popularity of the story later had me cited in Science Magazine, The Times, USA Today, the New York Post and many other international newspapers, but that’s another story. The Kindle version was even #1 in ‘Number Theory’ on Amazon for a while.
Which Topics Are You Most Interested in?
As some readers may have noticed, I tend to be interested in stories with a historical narrative. Most obviously, that includes biographies of prominent mathematicians and physicists, which I still publish about once every other month. My most recent one is about a fellow Norwegian, ‘The Mozart of Mathematics — Niels Henrik Abel’ who was born about an hour or so from where I’m from in Rogaland, Norway.
Beyond historical narratives I also enjoy writing stories that teach me bits of math I don’t know. For instance, last year I spent about two weeks getting acquainted with the Black-Scholes partial differential equation, Brownian motion and various ‘Flavors of Randomness’ so that I could write about their uses in finance. My story about the first, ‘The Black-Scholes formula, explained’, is now hovering around 100,000 views. I am currently working on a similar story about sabermetrics, ‘The Mathematics of Baseball’.
My professional research is not in math at all, although my office happens to be in the same building as one Norway’s leading researchers on the Riemann zeta function. Small world indeed. My Ph.D. dissertation is entitled ‘Entry Strategies for Platforms in Two-Sided Markets’ and is a mixed-methodology thesis describing the dynamics of entry for digital platforms in markets characterized by network effects at scale. Although I use math here and there in my research, I don’t think there would be much of an interest among our readers for that stuff.
How Would You Describe Your Writing?
Long. I tend to rattle on when I get the chance. My Nash story is over 11,000 words. Generally, I hope to only touch a topic once, so I want that story to have every bit of information I could find that is interesting. A general rule is that I try to write things that I would want to read.
I think a lot of writers unnecessarily obsess about length. If the topic warrants a long story, write a long story. Go back fifty years and none of my stories would even be long enough to make up a book that could go to print. I love short books — such as On Bullshit* by Henry G. Frankfurt — but the economics of them rarely ever make sense. That’s why Medium is such a great outlet for writers.
Which is Your Most Popular Story?
Beyond the story that started it all (about the Riemann hypothesis) my most popular story is without a doubt my biography of von Neumann, entitled ‘The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann’. That story blew up on Hacker News and because of that, still hovers around the top five results on Google for his name.
Which is Your Favorite Story and Why?
It’s more so about a mathematician rather than a math topic, but my favorite story that I wrote, is ‘Kurt Gödel’s Brilliant Madness’. I felt like I really “got to know him” writing that, which took a few weeks. The story is essentially about how complicated brilliant people can be, and moreover, about how important the people around them are to their creativity. Gödel had at least four such people in his life: his wife Adele, John von Neumann, Albert Einstein and Oskar Morgenstern. Adele, his only love, cared for him when he was sick and indulged his many quirks. Reading about their life together, you get the sense that she really knew and accepted him for who he was. Same for the other three, who acted as patrons throughout various parts of his life.
When the story was published I was contacted by Morgenstern’s daughter who said she enjoyed the story because it made her recall how she would wrap Gödel in blankets and bring him tea at her parents’ house. That really invigorated my sense of purpose in telling these stories — even though many of them have been told before here and there.
Which Story is Your Biggest Flop?
Without a doubt, ‘The Envy-Free Cake-Cutting Procedure’. I have no idea why. People like cake, right? It took me weeks to write too. I’d be surprised if it has 5,000 views to this day, a year later.
Who is Your Favorite Mathematician?
If you had asked me when I was in college, I would have said John Forbes Nash, Jr. immediately. My fascination with him is summed up by Herta Newman’s quote that “he was so incredibly himself”.
These days it’s a toss-up between Nash and Gödel. Gödel is clearly much more important in the history of mathematics. It’s hard to say which was more technically brilliant. Nash, in his own quirky way was quite the powerhouse before his schizophrenia set in:
Mathematicians in the 1950s had known about relatively trivial routines for solving ordinary differential equations using computers. There were however, no established methods for solving nonlinear partial differential equations, such as those that occur during the turbulent motions of a jet engine. […] It took Nash about six months to arrive at his theorem, which was achieved from a process of Nash visiting Nirenberg’s office weekly to discuss his progress.
By the spring of 1958, Nash was able to obtain basic existence, uniqueness and continuity theorems using methods of his own invention. Astoundingly, the methods involved “transforming nonlinear equations into linear equations, and then attacking these by nonlinear means” — something nobody had thought of before, “a stroke of genius”.
How Many Unfinished Drafts are on Your Medium Account?
181. If I have an idea, I’ll start a draft with my immediate thoughts. Given that I’ve published 66 stories, I guess about a fourth of my drafts turn into publishable stories.
What is Your Favorite Math Book?
My favorite math book, unsurprisingly, is A Beautiful Mind* by Sylvia Nasar. It really is the perfect biography of a mathematician. Notable other mentions are Prime Obsession* by Derbyshire (if you can ignore his obnoxious politics), American Prometheus* by Bird & Sherwin and Dark Hero of the Information Age* by Conway & Siegelman.
- Those are all Amazon Affiliate links
What is Your Dream Job?
I’m basically doing it.
The combination of doing research at a university, writing and researching stories, working with students and doing the occasional side project really does it for me. In the future, I’d love to write a book. In some alternate universe I’d love to be a composer of classical music or obviously, a professional mathematician.
What is Your Favorite Non-Self-Authored Story in CP?
When it comes to writing and explaining difficult proofs, it’s hard to beat Ethan Horsfall, “Maths and Musings”. Check out his narration through question six from the 1988 International Mathematical Olympiad:
Do You Have Any Advice on How to Succeed as a Writer on Medium?
It’s a boring answer, but I found it to really work for me: consistency. Keep writing and publishing stories. It’s the same for podcasts, YouTube videos, Instagram posts and everything else. Just keep putting out content and some of it is bound to stick.
Where Can People Find You to Learn More?
My newsletter Privatdozent (on the history of mathematics and physics) is available at privatdozent.co. The rest of my writing is posted on my Medium profile. You can also follow me on Twitter.
