As a former math major who earned a math degree but does not actually know much math (or, at any rate a good deal less than is generally assumed by the traders to whom I act as risk management cop), I feel particularly qualified to riff on our titular subject.
Further burnishing my credentials is my participation in that great but long-forgotten band – The Math Pistols – for whom I had the privilege of holding down the rhythm guitar spot some 45 years ago, and who delighted Madison audiences for several months with punk-inspired renditions of songs like Cat Stevens’ “Wild World” and Carol King’s “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?”.
After which, by popular demand, we broke up. But we did play the 1982 Mifflin Street Block Party on the roof of the Mifflin Street Co-op. And how many of y’all can claim as much?
If that doesn’t impress you, nothing will.
So, I may as well proceed by informing you that, routinely, I find math doing anything but mathing. If you’re a math major, you deal with this routinely. You can’t divide anything by zero. Negative numbers have no square root.
And even in word problems. The unresolved chronological emergence of the chicken and egg. The barber’s paradox: if a barber shaves everyone in town who doesn’t shave himself, and only those who don’t shave themselves, does he shave himself? The Monty Hall problem: should a Let’s Make a Deal contestant, after having made a door selection and having one of the other doors revealed to be worthless, change his pick (somehow, the answer is yes)?
One can look at non-mathing math in one of two ways – with frustration or with joyous acceptance. I choose the latter. And it has helped.
Because the parallels in the real world are striking. Take, for instance, the production of pennies, discontinued this past Wednesday after 238 years of fruitful multiplication. The math here simply wasn’t mathing (or, if you prefer, the economics were not economizing) – particularly insofar as producing a each one — the worth of which had been fixed for all time at $0.01 – costs $0.036.
OK; fair enough. But maybe we could do one more minted printing. Just another 3.8 quadrillion of them – to be used as a one-time payoff of our ~$38T debt. Of course, there are practical problems here – most notably the storage/transport of these new metallic Lincolns, the weight of which, at 2.5 grams/coin, would exceed 100 million tons.
Then again, the math of entire $38T and growing deficit ain’t, by any stretch, mathing. Reasonably reliable ratios (~125% of GDP, > $105K per capita, etc.) and the certainty of continued expansion tell a tale of unsustainability.
We ain’t gonna pay this back – at least by conventional means.
One would hope this was the motivation behind Chicago Treasurer/2026 Congressional Candidate Melissa Conyears-Ervin’s move to boycott the purchase of United States Treasury Securities, of which the lion’s share of the above-mentioned 38 Tril national hole is comprised. She does, after all, hold an MBA — from the conveniently located but heretofore unranked Graduate School of Business at Roosevelt University where she presumably received thorough preparation for managing the city’s $10B investment portfolio.
However, one would be wrong on that score as well; the move is instead a self-proclaimed one finger salute to 45/47. Indisputably, she has her reasons. But managing the financial affairs of a city which: a) now owes three times the value of its investment portfolio ($30B), b) takes in taxes about $2B and c) runs its own annual fiscal deficit in excess of $1B, one hopes that they are good ones:
As pointed out by the WSJ, the Windy City’s $10B of assets generated a 3.6% return last year, which falls short of the >4% yield on the U.S. 10 Year Note.
Presumably, though, the boycott is good politics –as she moves towards assuming the Congressional Seat of Danny Davis – retiring along with Pelosi after serving 14 terms. On the other hand, I think she stands about as much chance of losing as does JFK’s grandson Jack Schlossberg, now running to represent Manhattan’s 12th District. Kalshi place’s Schloss’s odds at a meagre 25%, but given his connection to Camelot, I’ll take the over.
On a related note, and with only partially functioning math, the government re-opened this past week, after 7 weeks of furlough which nobody even noticed until the shortage of air traffic controllers disrupted the travel plans of the electorate. At which point peace and harmony prevailed on Capitol Hill.
One side benefit of this, albeit of dubious merit, is the deferred release of critical macroeconomic data – including September Retail Sales and (perhaps even more importantly) that month’s Jobs Report. However, no data point under the sun rises to the dignity of Wednesday’s NVDA earnings release, upon which not just the fate of the markets, but that of the economy and arguably of the entire world, rests.
Investors have demonstrated happy feet on the name, and, indeed upon the whole tech complex, wondering, in a non-mathing way, if this whole AI thing is all it’s cracked up to be. I wish I could help y’all here, but I’m fresh out of ideas and my subscription to Gemini just expired.
Some of the hand wringing is also owing to increased concern that the Fed, rather than cutting rates, is more likely to stand pat. So much so that the futures market now tilts probabilistically towards the latter:
I’d hasten to calm everyone’s fears about this. The decision is still 2 ½ weeks away and I’ll all but guarantee that it’s another slice at Fed Funds. If not, it’s so long Powell, been good to know ya.
More broadly, rates across the curve are coming down. By all accounts, the Treasury Department is active, if surreptitious, buyers of their self-issued securities and will continue to be so for at least the next year.
Whether this offsets the rate-rising impact of the Chicago boycott remains to be seen.
After that, the trajectory of rates will depend entirely on mid-term election outcomes. And it is a near-certainty that if the Democrats win, Team Bessent will be a less enthusiastic buyer of its own paper.
Till then, though, fixed income and equity securities should, at minimum retain a bid.
There may be some math that doesn’t math about the associated impact on inflation. But that, I suspect, is a trade-off that our betters are willing to accept. Among other matters, and as has been the case throughout history, the academic community sets the tone – as evidenced by a recently released internal report from Harvard University, indicating that grade inflation is now so rampant that the average Crimson GPA has reached a near-upper bound at 3.83.
I fell somewhat short of this threshold back in my undergrad days. At the University of Wisconsin, where, in 2024, the average GPA clocked in at a paltry 3.481.
I won’t say where I landed relative to the Wiscy standard back in ’82. Suffice to state that with the Math Pistols on the rise, I didn’t see much point in busting my hump.
But the Pistols broke up and I went on to grad school. Where non-English speaking, non-math majors cleaned my GPA clock.
Meantime, I am proud to be affiliated with an undergraduate institution that does not bestow the mark of perfection on its constituents for simply existing and showing up.
From this perspective, my world of non-mathing math comes full circle, the area of which is equal to the square of its radius, multiplied by T.
As even some non-math majors know, T is an irrational number, meaning it goes on forever. At last count, it has been calculated out to 105 trillion digits, a task which took a supercomputer 75 days to complete. And it’s not done. In fact, it is closer to the beginning, because there is no end.
Mathematicians have accepted this paradox with blithe spirit since T was first discovered. In ancient Egypt. More than 4,000 years ago. One could therefore argue that mathematicians have been non-mathing for more than 40 centuries.
Maybe the rest of you are simply catching up, and if so, it’s about time you did.
Because, viewed correctly, non-mathing math can not only be lucrative but fun.
TIMSHEL