In anticipation of our upcoming Proton Prom, this week we’re re-airing the first Story Collider stories from two of the storytellers who will be performing at the event.
Part 1: When Aparna Nancherla's science fair project goes awry, she and her fellow students make some unethical choices.
Aparna Nancherla is a comedian and general silly billy. Her sense of humor is dry, existential, and absurd, with notes of uncalled-for whimsy. Think a wine you didn’t order. You can watch Aparna as Grace the belabored HR rep on the Comedy Central show, Corporate or hear her as the voice of Hollyhock on Bojack Horseman. She also has a half-hour special on the second season of The Standups on Netflix, as well as appearances on Late Night with Stephen Colbert on CBS and Two Dope Queens on HBO. Other acting credits include A Simple Favor, Crashing, High Maintenance, Master of None, and Inside Amy Schumer. Aparna was also named one of “The 50 Funniest People Right Now” by Rolling Stone. She also co-hosted the 2018 Women’s March Rally in NYC. In 2019, she was in a Super Bowl commercial with Michael Bublé for sparkling water neé seltzer.
In 2016, she released her debut album, Just Putting It Out There, on Tig Notaro’s label, Bentzen Ball Records, and recorded a half hour special for Comedy Central. On Monday nights, she co-hosts Butterboy at Littlefield in Park Slope, Brooklyn at 8 p.m. with genius treasures Jo Firestone and Maeve Higgins.
Part 2: After a reluctant start, mathematician Ken Ono makes an unexpected discovery.
Ken Ono is the Thomas Jefferson Professor of Mathematics at the University of Virginia and the Chair of Mathematics at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has published over 200 research articles in number theory. Professor Ono has received many awards for his research, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Packard Fellowship and a Sloan Fellowship. He was awarded a Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering (PECASE) by Bill Clinton in 2000, and he was named the National Science Foundation's Distinguished Teaching Scholar in 2005. He was an associate producer of the 2016 Hollywood film The Man Who Knew Infinity, which starred Jeremy Irons and Dev Patel. Earlier this year he put his math skills to work in a Super Bowl week commercial for Miller Lite beer.
Episode Transcript
Part 1
Hello. Thank you. How is everyone? Good? Good. Great.
I've never told this story before so I'm just gonna. Here it goes.
“I'm glad I did it partly because it was worth it but mostly because I never have to do it again.” Thus spoke Mark Twain. And his words can apply to a lot of things in life. He could be talking about bungee jumping, paper mâché, going off of heroin. Many things fall under that umbrella. In my case, it applies to high school and I don't think I'm alone in that.
A lot of people have a tough time in high school and I feel like the few people who cruise through, they looked at scans later in life as if to say, “Oh, that's too bad. You peaked so young.” I feel like Malcolm Gladwell wrote a whole book about it.
So, anyway, just to give you a little background, I grew up in northern Virginia. At the end of eighth grade, basically I had gone to private school for the past four years and it was like a fancy private school. Uniforms, Christmas play, the works. I was all set to go to high school, same school. I had my carefully cultivated social circle. I was ready for a lax dress code. I was ready to go, but there's one little catch.
In my county, there was this very fancy public magnet school that specialized in science and technology and you had to take a test to get in. I had no interest in taking the test. But my parents are both first-generation immigrants from India and doctors to boot, and it's not a stereotype if I say it, so don't even think it.
But they were like, “Just take the test. You don't have to go. Just take it to prove you got the stuff. And then, if you get in, then you can decide if you actually want to go.” So basically they were like, “You can burn that bridge when you come to it, but just take the test.”
So I took it, because nothing motivates a teenager more than to commit to something after boldly pronouncing something like, “Fine. I'll do it.” So I was like, “Fine. I'll take this test. You want me to take this test? I'll take it.”
Aparna Nancherla shares her story at The Greenspace in New York City in May 2016.
The weird thing is I got into the school. Like I didn't want to get in but I was a good student. I will admit that. But not for the right reasons. Like I wasn't passionate about school but it was more just like something to do, so that's why I was a good student. I don't know what that says about me.
I do remember on the test, like the essay question was just, “Do you think computers will ever become obsolete?” I remember it was the first time I answered an essay question by creating the shakiest thesis of all time and just meandering around an answer and articulating nothing of actual substance, which I feel is a very valuable skill as an adult. We're huge fans of that. This is really a breakthrough in that way.
But also, this was the ‘90s. The iPhone was just a twinkle in Steve Jobs’ eyes. None of us knew.
When I got in, my parents of course changed the game again. They were like, “Well, you got in. Just go for a year and then see how you feel.” They did that little parent twist.
So like many second-immigrant children before and after me, I was just gently but firmly pushed towards my bright STEM future. And just a note about the school. There was a very hard curriculum. A lot of the classes were already set for you, all your four years, especially in math, science and technology. And while you could test out into like a higher level, for most kids it was biology as a freshman, chemistry as a sophomore, physics as a junior and then the coveted geoscience as a senior, paired with an intensive lab that you also had to pick.
And I only bring this up just to give you an idea of how academically rigorous this school was. It was basically like there were a lot of eggheads at my school. And I don't mean that in a pejorative sense. I mean there were like some really smart kids. Some of them didn't have the social skills to remember to wear two shoes every day, but they had the ability to create a robot that would do it for them. They were very advanced.
The point is like a lot of kids, they knew what they were doing there. They belonged there for a reason. I didn't really feel like I knew how I fit in.
One of the first big assignments as a freshman for biology class was that you had to enter a project in the science fair as a group. The science fair was optional the rest of your high school career but as a freshman it was mandatory. They put together groups, like most school projects, by random chance and my group was a very hodgepodge mishmash.
I would say there was one girl who was very popular in my group. Let's call her Kelly. And then there was a very responsible achiever girl. Let's call her Michelle. Oh, wait. I guess that makes me Beyoncé. That's weird. Yeah, that's weird but I feel like it fits. I think that actually works out well. Because even then I did consider myself an outlier of sorts. Like a rogue star that people weren't ready for yet.
The topic we chose, which you've heard about a little tonight already, was environmental science. And this was not a time yet in which climate change was like hashtag trending. This was an earlier time in environmental science. Acid rain had been a hot-button issue for a while. People tried to save whales and rainforests and whales again. Peace frogs were on shirts but it wasn't as motivated as it is now.
Aparna Nancherla shares her story at The Greenspace in New York City in May 2016.
But we were like, you know, “The earth matters.” So we picked basically for our project, me and Michelle picked the project and then Kelly worked on being popular, which is a full-time job. And what we did for the project was we specifically looked at how aluminum nitrate, which is a chemical compound that's found in fertilizer and a lot of chemical runoff, like how it affects populations of organisms in water.
The organisms we chose to go with were paramecia for our experiment. If you're not familiar with paramecia, they're one-celled organism similar to amoeba in that they're completely dispensable and considered free range for any type of scientific experimentation.
So our project was pretty straightforward. Basically, we had these solutions of paramecium in water and then every day we would add a little bit more aluminum nitrate and see how the populations were affected.
And you’re like, “Oh, how did you get paramecia?” That's a great question. Like most one‑celled organisms, we got them from a biology catalog order. Or you could also get them on Tinder I guess now, another popular place. But the one little sort of hiccup in the research was that there was like a holiday break in the middle of our experiment. Basically, one of us had to take the data home and do the project from home.
And we were like, “Kelly, you haven't really carried your weight until now. So maybe you take it to your house.”
And Kelly is game. In her favor, she did agree to do it. But then the paramecia never actually made it to Kelly's house because she left them outside during tennis practice and, I'm sad to say, they all perished in the cruel sun.
I would imagine the last conversation among them was something like, “Phil, I thought the aluminum nitrate levels were bad but this heat is oppressive.”
And then the other one's like, “Yeah, Pablo. And, to add insult to injury, I hate tennis.”
I tried to add some diversity in my paramecia casting.
So we reached a real impasse with our project. Our girl group had to have an emergency meeting and there was not enough time at this point to start our project over again. The science fair was coming up too soon and we couldn't forfeit this early in our high school careers with a gaffe this big.
So with the intensity of like a gathering of witches under the full moon, we were like, “We can't tell anyone about this.” So we were like, “We're just going to use our earlier data and then extrapolate the rest,” because that's a thing you can do.
I know it was wrong. We all knew it was empirically wrong but it's like what choice did we have. If anything, we were kind of operating on the plus side of plus‑or‑minus scientific error but you need that half.
And for some reason we completely excused Kelly from any accountability. We were just like, “Yeah, it's very hard to maintain your position as a cheerleader.” She was a cheerleader. “You couldn't have known.”
So even though we didn't want to work together before, now we were bonded together in this like sick, low-stakes version of I Know What You Did Last Summer, starring paramecia. We swore secrecy among the three of us and I hope the statute of limitations is up on that because here I am talking about it pretty openly.
But it's like isn't that the last step of the scientific method anyway? It's like finish your experiment by all means necessary. I feel like that is a step that you don't talk about. The truly twisted part to me was that we took our paramecia back to the lab and then I kept adding aluminum nitrate every day like a true psychopath, mad scientist. Like, “Everything's going great. Here I am. Where's my Nobel?”
Then fate had a really weird twist in store which was that so then we took our project to the school science fair. There were prizes in every category. And I don't know how this happened. Some way somehow, we created a great cover story, I guess, because we got third place in our— I know. That's really a testament to us, I think. That's really what that is.
And now it was like the stakes were even higher. We had to go to another level of science fair and I was like, “Well, now, there's really no way we can come clean.” Because a scandal this big could unravel the scientific community as we know it. The only honorable thing to do is to go to the regionals, lie through our teeth, boldly misrepresent ourselves confidently. It's the American way.
Of course, that's what we did. We went there. We told our story again. No one was impressed at regionals. We were like, “Thank God. We can just slink out of this and never talk about it again.” I mean we had like the blood of two orders of paramecia on our hands. Don't think we weren't up at night being like, “I hope they're happy wherever they are.”
I've thought about this story often because it's not something I'm proud of. But I was trying to think what lessons can you call here. I think one of them is definitely like, at the end of the day, pick a career where you can spin your lack of integrity into a cheeky life lesson. That's a fun one.
What we did was very wrong, but I almost feel like because it was a group effort it diluted our individual wrongness, which interestingly enough is a principle in psychology which I later majored in and did a thesis in and did not kill any experimental or control groups, because my subjects were humans so that would be more serious. You can cheat alone, but if you do it with other people there's kind of a circle of trust where you're just like, “We're in this together.”
And if you have perfectionistic tendencies, it's kind of like you feel like a fraud all the time anyway. So to actually be one felt in some ways liberating. I was like, “This is what I've been talking about.”
In the end, I feel like science, despite its emphasis on hard data and irrefutable proofs, is like is as subject to the fickleness of human nature as anything else. But I feel like if you asked our paramecia, they’d just be like, “Go to hell.”
Thank you.
Part 2
I’m up here by accident. My father, some of you may know, was a mathematician. He, for many years, was a professor at Johns Hopkins. I don't know about many of you but when I was a teenager the last thing I wanted to do was be anything like my dad. Definitely, the last thing I wanted to do was anything that my parents told me that I should do.
I’m not trying to be funny and I love my parents, but when you're sixteen that’s not unusual. So in 1984, that’s when I was sixteen, so you'll know I’m about to turn fifty. Hawaii five-0, right? When I was sixteen in 1984, a letter came to the house addressed to my dad written by a widow, a widow of an Indian mathematician by the name of Ramanujan. We made a film about him.
It was the most extraordinary letter. I'd never heard of Ramanujan before and his letter to my dad thanked him for being one of eighty mathematicians that helped give Ramanujan’s widow a bust. You see, Ramanujan turned out, as I learned, was a major mathematical figure. When he died in 1920 as a hero in India the government had promised to erect a statue in his honor. But by the 1980s, well over sixty years later, the government had not come through with it, and the mathematicians of the world gave Mrs. Ramanujan the statue.
Ken Ono shares his story at The Tipsy Crow in San Diego in January 2018. Photo by Ernesto Ortiz.
I thought that was a lovely story but, I have to admit, when I was sixteen, what I heard was there was a two-time college dropout who ended up inspiring the mathematicians of the world. And when you're sixteen and your parents are like super Asian, telling you to get 800 on the SAT math test or getting straight A’s, the only thing you hear is, “they look up to a two-time college dropout,” and I thought that was so awesome.
I know that sounds funny but it was really important for me because, and certainly for all of you who are professors, you see the kids in class that are mindlessly pursuing good grades, forgetting that they're in college, forgetting about the content part. And for whatever reason, there have been a lot of accidents in my life, and I've ended up following Ramanujan first as a source of inspiration but certainly for the last twenty or so years a source of mathematics.
He's actually really crazy. He was kind of like an incomplete prophet. He left behind three notebooks. I don't know why you all don’t read these notebooks because I can’t tell you how many papers I've written because I've gone through these notebooks and found really deep suggestions.
But that’s not my story. My story is actually very difficult to tell because I was a terrible student. I was a dick. I was one of those kids in college that didn’t want to go to class. I was one of those students that, rather perversely, got a lot of pleasure out of getting by in math class by not going to class. And I’m not proud of that.
I have to say that I had great mentors along the way. You know the names. Paul Sally and my advisor Basil Gordon and others, later Andrew Granville who rescued me at times when I almost quit. Jeff Lagarius, who is here, will remember me as a PhD student about to quit. I can’t believe that twenty years ago I was about to take a job at a bank. If you work for a bank that’s… I mean, my point is that there are a lot of accidents, there are a lot of mentors along the way and there can be a lot of luck in one’s career.
So my story is about how I accidentally ended up having a career in mathematics that somehow ends up with me standing, bumbling in front of all of you about whatever it is I’m going to say. The story I want to tell you about is my big breakthrough, how is it that I became discovered and ended up having a good career. And it’s totally by accident.
Ken Ono shares his story at The Tipsy Crow in San Diego in January 2018. Photo by Ernesto Ortiz.
So it was 1997, about twenty years ago. I got an email from Bruce Berndt. Many of you probably know Bruce. He's a professor at the University of Illinois. He's devoted his career to studying Ramanujan and I’m so grateful that he said that he had an unpublished manuscript that Ramanujan had left behind and he wanted some help editing this manuscript. I thought that actually sucked. What experience do I have at editing a manuscript? But it was like the most incredible experience.
So in 1997 I was beginning tenure track assistant professor at Penn State. This is Happy Valley. I was so grateful to get that job. Quite frankly, I didn’t believe I deserved the job. I was certainly an impostor, a fraud.
Let me just tell you a little bit about my circumstances. I had an office on the fourth floor. The building is called McAllister Building. It was built in 1904. It was originally intended to be the women’s dormitory but by 1997 it was in decrepit state, but somehow it was good enough to be the Math Department.
How awful was it? It was this awful. The internet went out probably every month, and I can exactly tell you why. Because the cables, which were in the attic, the squirrels -- we had squirrels living in the attic, so certainly the squirrels enjoyed the taste of internet cables, or at least the mouth-feel of them and so the internet went out all the time.
My office was in the corner. The ceiling was so low that there are places where, well, for half of the office you really couldn’t even stand up, and I’m not that tall.
I had an air conditioner. It didn’t work. And my window, it had a lock. That’s not right. It once had a lock, presumably broken off decades ago, but it didn’t even really matter because this building was in such decrepit state that there must have been like five or six layers of paint that made it impossible to open the window.
Anyway, getting back to this manuscript that Bruce Berndt asked me to help him out with, it was a chore. So we started going through the notebooks and there were some things in the notes that were just wrong. But it turned out that they weren’t wrong. It was that I wasn’t smart enough to figure out how right they were. You see, Ramanujan in his notebooks sometimes used the equal sign in a way that’s so different from what we would agree as. If A equals B, that’s supposed to mean A and B are the same thing. But to Ramanujan, it didn’t mean anything like that.
So over the course of several months, we went through the notes. I had this freakish yellow couch in my office. When you're a poor graduate beginning tenure track assistant professor, you can’t actually furnish your office. So I was so excited that when I went to Penn State Salvage I bought this stained orange couch for twenty bucks and it was like my most prized possession. By the way, if you need like adding machines from the 1960s, go to Penn State Salvage. You can buy it for five dollars.
So anyway, it was on this couch that I did most of my work. And in the course of going through Ramanujan’s notes, I finally began to figure out one of these formulas. It was so wrong that, just like Hardy said, it had to be somehow right. It had to be borne out of genius. I can’t explain this but it was one of those flashes of insight where I finally saw what Ramanujan had meant in this formula. It turned out it was related to an 80-year-old problem.
I went to the computer and I started computing, and term by term it actually worked out in spite of the fact that it had no right to work out. So I went back to the orange couch and I tried to build a theory out of it. And then it was another thing. I finally figured out it was related to things I had actually been thinking about. I hate it when someone tells you when they're dead after sixty years that you don’t understand your own subject.
It was an epiphany. I never had another epiphany like that. I sprang up from my yellow couch, I banged my head on the gabled roof of this ceiling of this building. I still have a notch here. It’s more than a scar. My skull is indented here. And I couldn’t believe the gift that I was given by going through these notes.
I ran out into the hall. I went to the bathroom. I washed my face with cold water. I was shaking, kind of like I’m shaking now because I’m petrified. And I got water all over. It was awful.
Then in walked my colleague Dale Brownawell, he's like, “What the hell happened to you? You're all wet. You're bleeding from your head.” And I couldn’t admit to him that the most amazing thing in my career had happened to me so I lied. Something like, “I hit my head on the coat hook in the bathroom stall.”
But any event, what I wanted to say about this story is that I have no right to be here. I’m not really smart. I’m really lucky and it’s one of those things when you're young, when you don’t know where your career is going to go that there are those miracles if you kind of believe in yourself.
So any event, to make a long story short I wrote a paper. It was solicited for publication in the Annals of Mathematics. I ended up winning a prize from the President of the United States for this theorem. I gave a speech about this theorem in the Indian Treaty Room at the White House and, at the end of the day, what’s going on at the back of my mind is not even my theorem.
I got a gift from God. Ramanujan was someone whose ideas came as visions from a goddess. Who am I to argue with that? I was a 2.7 GPA student at the University of Chicago and somehow that was what was going on in my mind. What am I doing at the White House?
Any event, if that inspires you, I hope it does because I've been following this genius and I can’t explain, I cannot begin to explain how amazing that’s been. Thank you.