Why math?
What is a mathematician supposed to do? What are they?
Whether you are making math easier for everyone or not, you become a mathematician the moment you make math easier for someone — even for a second. The scale doesn’t matter: maybe it’s just for you, maybe for your mom, maybe for humanity.
What matters is the ease you offer.
My mom taught me how to tip. She said, just move the decimal over and double it. That’s it. No calculator, no long division — just a little trick. And suddenly, I could do math in my head, at a table, with people watching. She made math easier that day — locally, just for me. And that makes her a mathematician.
She taught me a ton of math. But without people like Al-Khwarizmi, we wouldn’t move forward globally. A thousand years ago, people could solve some equations — but it was a mess. No structure, no steps, no method. Then Al-Khwarizmi wrote it all down. He showed us how to move terms, reduce problems, and solve for the unknown. His book, al-jabr, is where we get the word “algebra.”
That’s what a mathematician does. They didn’t just solve problems — they made it easier for others to solve them too.
Maybe you don’t think of yourself as a “mathematician.”
But maybe you are — and you just didn’t know it. Maybe it happened on a smaller scale. That’s just as meaningful.
Maybe you have a PhD and feel overwhelmed by the weight of that title. Or maybe you just helped your kid with fractions last week.
If you’ve ever made math easier for someone — in any way, at any scale —
you’re a mathematician.