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NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB, geboren 1960 im Libanon, interessiert sich als Essayist und Forscher vor allem für Fragen der Wahrschein-lichkeit. Seine Einsichten bezieht er in erster Linie aus einer 20jährigen Tätigkeit im Handel mit Derivaten. Er ist derzeit Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering an der New York University. Seine Bestseller »Glückliche Narren« und »Der Schwarze Schwan« erschienen in 33 Sprachen. Taleb lebt überwiegend in New York.

In seinem Weltbestseller »Der Schwarze Schwan« problematisierte Nassim Nicholas Taleb die zunehmende Unberechenbarkeit der Welt. Jetzt liegt sein wichtigstes Buch vor: In »Antifragilität« gibt Taleb die große, praktisch-philosophische Antwort auf die Herausforderungen unsicherer Zeiten.

Nicht indem wir Zufälle und Ungewissheit um jeden Preis abzuwehren versuchen, gewinnen wir, sondern indem wir sie zu Stärken ummün-zen. Bestand hat nur das Antifragile. Alles, was nicht antifragil ist, wird verschwinden.

Antifragilität ist weit mehr als Robustheit oder Resilienz. Während das Widerstandsfähige im besten Fall einen Zustand beibehalten kann, wird das Antifragile besser und besser. Und es ist immun gegenüber falschen Vorhersagen. Warum kleine Strukturen besser sind als große, Stadtstaaten besser als Nationen, warum

Schulden uns schaden und warum das, was wir als »e! zient« bezeichnen alles andere als e! -zient ist. Talebs Beispiele bedienen das ganze Spektrum von Finanzen und Wirtschaft, Politik, Wissenschaft, Privatleben.

Multidisziplinär und mit großer Übersicht umreißt „Antifragilität“ ein neues Denken für eine Welt, die bei allem Fortschritt niemals berechenbar sein wird.

Umschlaggestaltung und -motiv: bürosüd, München, www.buerosued.de

Autorenfoto: Sarah Josephine Taleb

»Antifragilität ist eine neue Sicht auf die Welt. Mehr noch: Um die Gegenwart zu verstehen, muss man

Antifragilität verstehen.« Rolf Dobelli, Autor von »Die Kunst des klaren

Denkens« und »Die Kunst des klugen Handelns«

»Taleb hat meinen Blick auf die Welt verändert.«

Daniel Kahneman, Nobelpreisträger für Ökonomie

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Entwurf, March 13, 2013

Gunter M. Ziegler (March 13, 2013) Mathematik – Das ist doch keine Kunst!

Contents

Preface1: –22000/2001: The Bone With the Primes2: 1498: A genius makes mistakes3: 1522/1525: A German revolution4: 1557: The Invention of the Equality Sign5: 1801: Gauß6: 1833: Legendre7: 1930: Cold War8: 1933: Portrait of a Lady9: 1963/2001: How and Why10: 1970: F**k You!11: 1977: 120 Cities12: 1992: Displacement13: 1993: The Portrait of the Mathematician14: 1998: The Girl with the Calculators15: 2000: Soap Bubbles16: 2001: Formulas as Art17: 2001: Patented Mathematics18: 2003: Ein Chip im Museum19: 2004: Angle of Return20: 2008: Berlin Alexanderplatz21: 2008: The Bands in our Heads22: 2011: Knots23: 2011: Mae West24: 2012: Gauß in Russland

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Gunter M. Ziegler Version: March 13, 2013 Mathematik – Das ist doch keine Kunst!

Chapter 15

1998:The Girl with the Calculators

http://www.spiegel.de, Article by Holger Dambeck

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Gunter M. Ziegler (March 13, 2013) Mathematik – Das ist doch keine Kunst!

“Stereotypes are very resistent against change.”

Sarah Sherry, aged five

“Schoolgirl Sarah Sherry, aged five, plays with calculators” ( c� Reuters)

Unfortunately I don’t remember when and how I first came across this photo of the little girl withthe calculators. By chance I then realized at some point that hidden in the image file there is thenews report that came with the image:

Schoolgirl Sarah Sherry, aged five, plays with calculators in her first year class at theBeaver Road Infant School January 5.Schools standards minister Stephen Byers told a conference in Manchester on Mondaythat standards of literacy and numeracy for girls were higher for girls than boys.

The message as such perhaps is not that surprising for us; the prejudice that computing “is moresomething for boys” should actually have died out with the end of the 19th century; it is true only ifyou refrain from letting girls learn anything at all, as they partially do it in Pakistan and Afghanistanthese days. Here in the West we rather have to be careful to make sure that the boys don’t getfrustrated early on, when it turns out that the girls are plainly better at concentrating, they workmore carefully – and thus they also learn to read and to calculate much better and faster.

But apparently the British School Standards Minister – then 44 years old and a rising star in thecabinet of Tony Blair – had the impression that you can make a good impression with such a pieceof news. Monday, January 5, 1998: Presumably this was the first day of school after the Christmasbreak, on such a day it is nice if in your little opening speech at a conference of, say, EducationalScientists, you can shine with a positive message for the news.

Unfortunately, the minister didn’t shine that much two weeks later with his own calculation skills.BBC News is clearly enjoying to report from a radio interview:

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The minister responsible for standards in British schools went to the bottom of theclass when he got his sums wrong in a radio interview. Stephen Byers, interviewed onBBC Radio Five about government plans to improve numeracy in schools, was asked tomultiply eight by seven.

“Fifty-four,” said the minister, whose job is to raise standards in the classroom forreading, writing and arithmetic.

But a spokesman for the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, said he still had full confidence inByers, a junior minister regarded as one of the Government’s rising stars.

So something didn’t go that well for Stephen Byers, who progressed in his political career nevertheless,and had to step down as Secretary of State for Transport, Local Government and the Regions only in2002, due to various scandals, and who continued to be a member of the House of Commons until2010.

Sarah Sherry, however, made her next great appearance ten years after the first one: On July2008, the journalist Holger Dambeck report in his “The Numerator” column on spiegel.de under theheadline “Girls can calculate as well as the boys”:

The prejudice doesn’t seem to fade: that girls and maths don’t fit together. A studywith seven million pupils in the US has now shown that in calculating and in geometrythere are no di↵erences between the sexes.

The article was illustrated with a stamp-sized photo of a little girl.

If you click at the image on spiegel.de, you get the photo large and complete. The caption reads:

Schoolgirl in front of calculator: “Stereotypes are resistent against change.”

Now if you want to be pedantic, you can find several mistakes in the caption. Indeed, such a smallgirl is probably not a schoolgirl, but rather in preschool, right? And she sits in front of severalcalculators, so the plural-“s” is missing. And indeed the caption [in German] also had the wrongplural of “stereotype”!

On the other hand – perhaps the basic message is still right, that the stereotype isn’t going awaythat girls and maths don’t fit together? At least this remains true if the media keep repeating itoften enough?

On the other hand – what would the girl say about this? That I now really wanted to know!

If Sarah Sherry was five in January 1998, then she should have been fifteen in Summer 2002, andtwenty by now, and thus old enough to be asked, how she thinks about it. Isn’t it interesting whetherthe “poster girl” for the message “girls can caculate” could calculate, whether Maths was easy orhard for her at school.

But where is Sarah Sherry today, what does she do, how can one find her? Aber wo ist SarahSherry heute, was macht sie, wie findet man sie? In order to find that out, I wrote to the director of

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Gunter M. Ziegler (March 13, 2013) Mathematik – Das ist doch keine Kunst!

the “Beaver Road Infant School” for information about the school girl Sarah Sherry. Now answer.And I wrote to four women named “Sarah Sherry” on facebook, four out of twenty with this name,namely four of them for whom I thought that with age, country and profile photos “could fit”. On aTuesday morning in October 2012 my emails went out. Reaction: none, for a whole week. But thenon Sunday evening 8:01 pm, there was a message on facebook, from one of the four Sarah Sherrys:

“Prof Ziegler

I am the Sarah Sherry in the photo. I vaguely remember the photo being taken when Iwas in infant school. The photo was not staged I was simply playing with the calculatorsafter finishing my maths classwork. What would you like to know about it.

Sarah.”

It turns out that Sarah Sherry turned five in November 1997, so the age given on the photo wascorrect. She is from Manchester originally. The “Beaver Road Infant School” was part of her localcouncil primary school (4-11 years) that includes nursery, infants and juniors. Sarah was in schoolfull-time. She remembers playing with the calculators, but only vaguely having the photo taken. Thecalculators belonged to the school. They always did a lot of mental arithmetic at school but werealso taught how to use a calculator.

After Beaver Road Primary School Sarah went went to the local council run secondary school, ParrsWood High School. After that she studied A-levels at Parrs Wood Sixth Form, with A and AS levels(what in Germany would be called “Leistungskurse”) in Maths, Further Maths, Physics, Dance andDrama. To my question “Did you like maths in school? Were you good at it? Have you beenencouraged?” she answers “Yes, yes and yes.” She is now at Manchester University, studying to bean engineer, concentrating on Materials Science.

“It’s the Year of Mathematics. The girls can draw something as long as that lasts” ( c�Freimut Wossner)

This is quite remarkable, as even nowadays there are very few women in the entering classes in Engi-neering – often only one or two among hundreds of students. This is quite di↵erent in Mathematics,where there are between 40 and 50 percent women start their studies even as engineering schoolslike TU Berlin, where from the start you can register for studies in “Mathematics with EconomicsEmphasis” or “Techno-Mathematics”.

“Girls and Mathematics/Sciences/Technology”? Sarah Sherry says that girls can do it, and theyshould do it, and she cares about that. “Madchen und Mathematik/Naturwissenschaften/Technik”?Sarah Sherry sagt, Madchen konnen das, sie sollten es tun, und das liegt ihr am Herzen. “I feelscience (especially the engineering side) needs to be made more appealing to girls, that it’s not just amasculine career choice.” She has never felt any barriers to studying maths and science and certainly

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at school girls and boys were all treated the same, although she was the only girl in one of her mathsclasses and one of two in her physics class. That never bothered her, however “I can see how thingslike this may be o↵ putting to some girls”. She is not restricting her life to the Science alone. Whileshe very much still enjoys maths and science, another love of hers is dance and theatre, though thisis kept as a hobby for her at the moment.

This sounds like her. A poster on her facebook page reads “I am who I am. Your approval is notneeded.” But of course we also want to know what she looks like today. Here is Sarah Sherry, agedtwenty:

Sarah Sherry, 2012 ( c� Sarah Sherry)

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