Is Yitang Zhang an intellectual? |
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Did you show your work to your colleagues?
No, I didn’t. Even in the circle of my friends, although they are also mathematicians, they do not understand this problem very well. So I just mentioned I was working on it, but I didn’t show my work to anybody. I don’t like to tell so much to other people before I get to the result. I am a shy person.
Andrew Wiles also told almost nobody about his work on Fermat’s Last Theorem.
If he had told the public about his research, he wouldn’t have been concentrating on the problem. That might have happened to me. Sometimes it’s important to be alone, so you can concentrate on what you’re doing. If there are too many social obligations, that bothers me so much.
Did you experience any emotions when you realized you’d solved the problem?
Not so much. I am a very quiet person.
Were you excited?
A little. Not too much.
How has your wife reacted?
Before I published this paper, she had no idea about it. Now of course she’s happy. Still both of us are very peaceful. We are not too excited.
An intellectual is a person who engages in critical thinking... about the reality of society, and proposes solutions for the normative problems of society, and thus gains authority as a public intellectual. Coming from the world of culture... the intellectual participates in politics, either to defend a concrete proposition or to denounce an injustice, usually by producing or by extending an ideology...
Remarkably, our primary usage of the noun "intellectual" wouldn't include Zhang. It is something like:
- intellectual: A brainy outspoken celeb. A famous person who broadcasts their opinions on serious social matters. (Particularly if they're involved in the public speaking circuit, particularly if they speculate about politics.)
Scholars (especially scientists or mathematicians) who don't debate in public and don't mouth off about, say, elections or creationists on Twitter are excluded from this sense. (As if said mouthing off was a more creditable act of intellect than proving the deep connectedness of the Monster group and modular functions.)
This is pure Two Cultures bullshit: a mental land grab by Arts people. (They pulled off a similar annexation of the idea of creativity, around the late C19th.) All scientists are knowledge workers, and that's the sense of "intellectual" that should be primary.
It is no deficiency of Zhang that 1) the discourse can't follow number theory and 2) that he is a comically and beautifully diffident man.
Let's see when "intellectual" came in as a proper noun:
Doesn't tell us much. We can get some evidence for the arts colonisation of the term as follows:
Which is a pleasingly strong signal: it is born in the 30s, takes hold in the 40s and increases through the mid-C20th, the long years of 'Theory' in the nonsciences.
Some wider senses for the term:
- intellectual: Any scholar. Anyone whose labour is primarily knowledge-based.
- intellectual: Anyone whose interests include researching and forming reasoned positions on classically academic things.
- intellectual: Anyone whose interests include researching and forming reasoned positions.
So usage (1) covers a really tiny fraction of intellectually active people, and a fraction even of people who spend all their time forming and sharing opinions about the world. This is maybe because "intellectual" (1) is a contraction of "public intellectual" - which is maybe derived from the Leninist concept of a vanguard intelligentsia: basically just propagandists, whose role was to steer the educated public. (So the hypothesis is: social commentary was the raison d'etre of the Marxist intelligentsia, and so their descendents and the descendents of their opponents have inherited this distorted and limited idea of intellectuality.)
I'm not insisting that usage (4) is best just because it's biggest. Consider the little essays at the start of mainline TVTropes pages (e.g. these brief histories of animation): they definitely are research, definitely the work of critical minds. Are they intellectuals? Wiki editors often display enormous erudition. "Hobbyist" or "fan" can cover some of this group, if we must leave "intellectual" with its present high status. But expansion is necessary too.
(Dissemination does seems important: a full-blown intellectual should publish, and engage with incompatible views. So it's only the hostile takeover by social theorists and celebrity culture I'm actually opposing.)
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Tags: the-two-cultures, maths, politics, history, argument, STEM