Final Paper INAG110

Jorge Montero Vallejo

Neo-Aristotelian Criticism:
TED Talk:

Math is forever

Speaker: Eduardo Senz de Cabezn

Short information about the speaker:
Eduardo Senz de Cabezn is a Spanish mathematician who teaches math and
other engineering courses, and also does research on Computer Systems, at
the University of La Rioja, Spain. Besides that, he is also recognized for being an
excellent storyteller: he tells tales at taverns and other clubs to children and
adults.
The speech that I chose for my final paper is from TED talk event organized in
Argentina. It is originally in Spanish but the feedback that I found was mostly in
English and they were all good critiques and commentaries. That was a factor
that motivated me to choose it, but the biggest one was my deep love for math
and science. Maybe this is something that seems already very typical in all my
works, but it is something that I cannot avoid since these topics are the only
ones that really make me speak with passion and interest. Before starting with
the analysis of the speech, I recommend very strongly to watch the speech
because the transcripts dont really totally show the quality of the speaker. I
hope you enjoy it.
Lets first start with a study of the arguments that the speaker used, the ideas
that he tried to transmit, and the appeal that he used for his speech. The
main argument in this speech was that mathematics is very important for the
progress of our society, even though it is sometimes marginalized or rejected
by the public, but even the importance of its applications does not complete the big
picture of it; math has a transcendence (maybe metaphysically speaking) that
most of us ignore. That was the main argument, it was a long one to state but
the structure, organization, and simplicity of the speech itself made this point
very clear.
The speaker used, at least for the most part, the "pathos" appeal. But
obviously, since he is a scientist and this is all about math, the logos appeal is
inevitable, but he used it in a very easy and reduced way only to keep us aware
that we were in front of a mathematician. Examples of this are the parts when
he uses percentages and numbers to describe the behavior of the public in
several situations: Then 33.51 percent of women[]. And 64.69 percent [].
Another 0.8 percent[]. He uses the logos styles and resources but in very
quotidian situations, making it a device for his overall pathos appeal, about
which I will speak now. The pathos appeal is used in different manners, for
which the speaker takes several roles. For example, in some parts of the speech
he makes people feel how badly are mathematicians sometimes rejected, that
was his starting point and it worked very well. But since he also had to

Final Paper INAG110

Jorge Montero Vallejo

somehow connect with his audience, he also had the role, or at least simulated
it, of being unfamiliar with mathematics, showing the perspective that maybe
the majority of his audience had. A brilliant example of this was when he
mentioned the word truncated octahedron followed by the phrase which as
you all know with a slow and sarcastic tone, obviously making fun of how strange the
geometric solid was for everybody.
In general, the speaker used the pathos appeal almost completely, using the
logos appeal as a tool to entertain the public, but still with very emotional
appeals because all he wanted to do was to transmit what are the true
emotions in regular people and mathematicians when they sit and talk about
science. Lets now proceed with the analysis on the organization of the speech.
The speech had a very blatant and marked structure, it was highly organized.
But not in the sense that it was mechanical or so schematic that it became boring, but
in the sense that it was like a tale being told to children, a very easy going
organization. The overall structure was the following: he went from telling how
rejected he sometimes felt by people, to the point where the key question of
what is math for is asked, and from here he went on to explain the perspectives
and finally to talk about how eternal and immortal mathematics are, finishing
with a very charming message about love. And he used very good transitions
to connect each part, one example of this was when he went from his personal
story of being asked in a tavern about his work, to the point where he talks
about the use of math. The transition that he used came from the little
percentage of people that stays with him and dont flee after hearing that he is
a mathematician, a little percentage that asks But what is math really for?, a
question for which the speaker gave a very funny interpretation, and thus he
started the part about the uses of mathematics and the sides or perspectives
that it had for that question.
This was his interpretation, which by the way also reveals its true meaning
since people laughed at it, recognizing how true it was:
When someone asks you what math is for, they're not asking you about
applications of mathematical science. They're asking you, why did I have
to study that bullshit I never used in my life again?
In terms of the structure, lets also look at the make-up of the introduction,
body and conclusion.
As I have already stated before, he starts his speech by telling us a personal
story (pathos appeal used here) that, besides being unfamiliar to us because of
his profession, feels also very personal to the majority of us because making the
other person stay to talk in what would be a date or just a colloquial meeting is
something hard for most people, especially for boys(nerdy boys!). From there
he built very well the rest of the speech(body), from which we would have to
remark how he brought up the ideas of the eternal, the conjecture, and the
theorem, because these were fundamental for the conclusion. These three
ideas were used then in another emotional situation but now being related to the

Final Paper INAG110

Jorge Montero Vallejo

idea of love, which was a good way to finish because it allowed him to finalize
his presentation by having a last and very strong personal approach (which is
something that romanticism always achieves). Here his last sentence that
summarized his definitions and ideas:
But if you want to tell them that you'll love them forever and ever, give
them a theorem! But hang on a minute! You'll have to prove it, so your
love doesn't remain a conjecture. (End)
And a last comment about the organization is about how effective was the fact
that it existed, how good was having this highly structured organization? It was
clearly a device that he needed to use to succeed because the topic was
something complicated that people would need to understand with ease and
even slowness, otherwise it gets boring. That is why the schematization of the
concepts worked very well for his audience, it traced out a very easy to follow
path, making them feel comfortably in an area that they dont normally
recognize or which they find unfamiliar.
But since I have already shown some sentences from the speech and talked
about how easy it was to follow, we will see that analyzing the style or the
speakers language will complement this idea that we might already have
about him. The first thing we have to say about that, it's that the language used
was somehow informal, but mostly quotidian and familiar, in other words, very
conversational and easy to approach.
But there were also some rhetorical devices that he used to make his speech
stand out, some of which were fundamental for the organization. The first and
more important device that he used was the parallelism of his stories, and by
that I mean that we repeated the situations presented in the speech. One
obvious example presented before was the use of percentages, which appeared
3 times in total. But the main parallelism was when he told us the stories about
how scientists reached to the conclusion of what geometric forms are the best
to fill planes and spaces, because these two anecdotes were related to the
ideas of how a conjecture becomes a theorem, which was a good entrance for
the conclusion. And a last stylistic resource used, which personally I found very
funny and also key to keep the audience alive, was the play of words that he
made with the definition of forever when comparing diamonds and theorems.
Here the sentence respecting to this part, which also made everybody laugh:
You probably said or were told at some point that diamonds are forever,
right? That depends on your definition of forever! A theorem -- that really
is forever. (Laughter)The Pythagorean theorem is still true even though
Pythagoras is dead, I assure you it's true. (Laughter)Even if the world
collapsed the Pythagorean theorem would still be true. Wherever any two
triangle sides and a good hypotenuse get together (Laughter) the
Pythagorean theorem goes all out. It works like crazy(more laughter).
I found this part to be specially effective because it played with some
elements that are very common in mathematics and in a very personalized
manner(using personification also), which was by the way a good method to make

Final Paper INAG110

Jorge Montero Vallejo

math seem something easy to address or to talk about. Definitely treating

the two legs and the hypotenuse of a right triangle in this way makes you
lose your fear for trigonometry.
And for the last part of the analysis, lets talk about the delivery and the
quality of the presentation in terms of memory also. And this is a very
fundamental part of the analysis because this was the other 50% of his
effectiveness, that is why I recommend at the beginning of the paper to
watch the speech, because the way he delivered his speech was charmingly
unique. Also the fact that it is in a different language can make the transcript
appear colder or more mechanical when compared with the actual
performance, and not only that but also some aspects of the accent
(Spanish) are crucial for the tones and rhythms of the speaking (that is
something that I could feel since my accent is Peruvian, not Spanish).
The delivery of the speech was extremely natural and conversational. In
terms of voices and tones, the speaker spoke with a very high volume, even
sometimes playing with them. For example, there was one part when he
gave the artistic approach for the question about the point of mathematics,
for which he used a transcendental tone of importance:
[]because mathematics have a meaning all their own -- a beautiful
edifice with its own logic -- and that there's no point in constantly
searching for all possible applications. What's the use of poetry? What's
the use of love? What's the use of life itself? What kind of question is that?
Another quality about his delivery was his complete interaction with the
audience, his constant eye contact and the expression of emotions throughout
every situation or anecdote he told. This is something that can only be
visualized in the video, for which I will give the URL at the end. And also an
additional feature was his displacement over the setting and the use of visuals
like when he presented the well-known truncated octahedron. Visually
speaking, the speaker used all the possible resources available at his hands to
keep the audience interested, but specially also to make them feel that
confidence that people normally dont have with scientists.
In terms of memory, the speaker never read any paper nor teleprompter, he
was a good speaker in that sense because he didnt even show monotony or he
didnt seem robotic, since these are usual aspect of a performance that arise
when the speaker has memorized his speech and is trying to remember it.
Maybe his mathematical memory helped him (not literally, but is impossible to
not link a good memory to the fact of being a mathematician). Obviously
having all the structure, anecdotes, short stories and resources well stored in
his brain made the speech seem very natural and fluent to people, it was an
exemplary presentation.
A final note to finalize this long analysis of the speech Math is Forever by
Eduardo Senz de Cabezn:

Final Paper INAG110

Jorge Montero Vallejo

This is the type of message that I love the most when listening to or watching
speeches of this type, the point where educational purposes combine with
scientific work to show to the world that science is not that boring and cold
thing happening in a laboratory, but something that involves creativity,
common sense, and maybe a little bit of intelligence, because science and
math are actually born from creativity and imagination. To arrive to theorems or
theories, scientists need to visualize or imagine things in very unique ways,
ways that could have never been imagined before by anyone. You cant make
science from reading lots of textbooks and acing very hard tests, and this is the
sad image that most people have about science because our current school
system kills their interest. You make science by using usual reasoning, some
intuition and mostly, curiosity. In fact, it is said that we all are born scientists,
that we all had that curiosity of wanting to explore the world around us when
we were very young, but all that curiosity died little by little as we grew
up(going to school, obviously). This speech is one of those things that make me
keep the hope that someday things will change, our educational system will
change, and the world will become a better place to live, because science can
only make things get better.