Huh, part 2: the crockpot of thought

As much as I liked the story of how June Huh first discovered the excitement and beauty of math, that wasn’t the part of Jordana Cepelewicz’s profile that resonated most deeply with me. That distinction goes to the following section:

Huh speaks slowly, pausing often and choosing his words carefully, and carries himself in a calm, peaceful manner that borders on meditative…. He proceeds just as deliberately when doing mathematics. Wang was shocked when he first witnessed it. “I have this math competition experience, that as a mathematician you have to be clever, you have to be fast,” he said. “But June is the opposite. … If you talk to him for five minutes about some calculus problem, you’d think this guy wouldn’t pass a qualifying exam. He’s very slow.” So slow, in fact, that at first Wang thought they were wasting a lot of time on easy problems they already understood. But then he realized that Huh was learning even seemingly simple concepts in a much deeper way — and in precisely the way that would later prove useful.

As an almost comically slow thinker myself, I relished and cherished this little tribute to plodding deliberation. To be clear, I do not equate myself with Huh intellectually, and the profound mathematical insights yielded by HIS slow process do not validate MY slow process. At the very least, though, Huh provides a vivid example of what’s possible when ideas have lots of extra time to simmer — perhaps due to choice, or perhaps due to the limitations of the brains we were issued.

I delighted in the above narrative last summer as I spent hundreds of hours revising a course that I had taught before multiple times. I’m delighting in them now amidst a similar effort.

I believe in my process; I could not have developed the Test Question Template (TQT) framework without it. But even at its best, the process is long and lonely.

If this week’s quasi-affirmation comes in the form of a year-old magazine article about a math genius, I’ll take it.