By Buddy Roberts “Room 109,” Barry Spieler answered when I asked for directions to his office at
Not messy, I decided after seeing Spieler ensconced there a half-hour later. Functional. The mathematics texts occupying overstuffed bookshelves, assorted paperwork, and personal paraphernalia coexist in a sort of cluttered orderliness and make a fitting backdrop for a conversation with a personable man who dotes on his children, bakes his own bread, is learning classical guitar, has sung with the Birmingham Jewish Community Chorale, and is a past Alabama Professor of the Year.
A native of
The beginnings of a mathematician: “I liked (math) a lot in elementary school and high school. I was good at it, and it seemed to come easy.” On display in his office are his math team patch from junior high school and an old math paper (endorsed, “Very good, Barry,” by his teacher at the time and saved by his mother, who sent it to him when he received his doctorate). “My grandfather was good at math and puzzles and figuring things out. He was a math major in college but left his last semester because of the Depression. I got my math genes from him.”
Why many people don’t like math: “A lot of people think of math as a field that is very specific, right or wrong. Those words carry a lot of emotional weight, as if it’s almost a moral issue. It’s something bigger than they are, so they’re afraid if they can’t get it right. But math is done by people. It’s all about ideas people have to understand quantitative things in the world. People who are afraid of math or shy away from it haven’t had the chance to see it that way. They see it as ‘always right or wrong, and I always get it wrong.’”
Is math always scary? “The flip side is that some people take comfort in the right and wrong. It’s safe. It’s at least one thing that doesn’t waver. And that’s wrong, too. It isn’t just an answer to some question in a textbook.”
So what is math really about? “Real mathematics is a combination of logic and reasoning and finding a precise language in which to describe your observations about things. You can think of it as a language that gives you an economy of thought. You make use of mathematical abstraction to process something efficiently.”
How about an example? He pointed to the sphere he’s holding in the photograph. “When you notice something that h
as a pretty symmetrical pattern to it, you can describe it in levels of precision. You could say it’s made up of shapes. Plastic pieces. Pentagons. Squares. Triangles. Equilateral triangles. How many there are of each. The more precise the description, the more mathematical it is. Mathematical abstractions, models, charts, graphs, and equations represent something that’s real and should be used to describe and understand things. There’s no need to make abstractions just to make abstractions.”
Another example: The math and music class he teaches with voice professor David Smith every other year. Open to honors students, The Secret Life of Music and Mathematics explores how the two subjects are related. “It’s really cool. They’re both abstract, they start with ideas in people’s heads, and they involve expressing complex ideas in a non-discursive language. We look at the role both play in society to find other connections between them, we look at the ways in which people make music (which, like math, has its own kind of logic and rules), the students write compositions without traditional instruments, and they learn some serious math and serious music in the process.”
Why do many people perceive mathematics only as pointless abstractions and textbook exercises? “I think that, as teachers, we often underestimate people’s ability to have abstract mathematical ideas, while we over-expect them to be able to manipulate symbols.”
How a guitar lesson prompted him to reevaluate his teaching methods: “This is a good story. When I’d go to a lesson, I’d watch the teacher play his guitar, he told me what to do, then told me to go home and practice, and I made no progress. Eventually I went to a new teacher, and he didn’t have a guitar. I sat down, and he said, ‘Barry, play something you like.’ I did, and he sat there and watched me. Then he moved my elbow about an inch and said, ‘Play it again.’ All he did was nudge my elbow, but I could feel a difference. It relaxed a tension in my hand I didn’t realize was there. The teacher was intently watching what I was doing and then suggested something to help me do it better.”
The epiphany: “I went home thinking, ‘My gosh, instead of showing my students what to do and telling them to go home and mimic it, I want to be the teacher who says, ‘Show me what you do,’ and then nudge their elbows. That experience helped me realize what I was trying to do in my own classroom. Less lecturing, more listening. More showing them how to make things better for themselves, listening to their ideas and helping refine them.”
His hobby: Baking. “I especially like to bake bread. I don’t bake as much as I used to, but for a while we never bought bread at the store.” Even though it’s his outlet, the professor in him couldn’t resist bringing it to academia. “Together with my friend and colleague Terry Goodrick, a psychology professor, I taught a course here about bread-baking and the role of bread in the culture and history of the world. We covered the domestication of grain, the religious significance of bread, geopolitics, and the rise of big agricultural communities. We read about the science of bread and how yeast works, we took field trips to some bakeries, and we baked some pretty complex bread recipes. For some of the students, it was the first time they’d made bread from scratch.”
His favorite hangouts: “I live in coffeehouses. Cool Beans in
