Math and Climbing

John Gill was a math professor.  There are a bunch of other examples, and even more if you include professors of engineering.  Bill Ramsey and Steve Maisch are also professors who climb.  This guy has climbed up to 14c, and climbs Pump-o-Rama, solving the Gaussian integral at the double kneebar rest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgKav5vNSUI

Question: how many other people in the world could do this?  I could solve the integral, but I can't climb 13a.  Craig Faulhaber is a math teacher who has redpointed tons of 13a, so I assume he could (he's currently busy tending to his shattered body, but he'll be back).  I know a lot of you on this forum are strong climbers and have an engineering/math background... anyone else wanna raise her/his hand?

5.11a + 5.12c = 5.12c

Bernard Gillett

¬(like(sport) ∨ like(climbing)).

Last summer, I ran into two climbers on the Grand who said they taught at a university. I said, I bet you teach math. They said, no, we teach statistics.

JG seemed to feel there is a mental connection between math & climbing problems. I will assume he means unrelated to the physics of protection, etc. He can chime in. 

Leigh Ortenburger who wrote "A Climber's Guide to the Teton Range" was a mathematician. Lots of STEM nuts are into climbing; seems way harder to climb at a high level than solve Gaussian integrals, however.

Another Research Prof. Louis Reichardt

Years back I met John Gill we chatted about climbing for about 15 minutes. Spent the next couple hours talking science. Earlier that same evening I got a chance to chat with Layton Kor. Never talked about climbing but about his time living on Guam and scuba diving. 

Teton Climberwrote:

Leigh Ortenburger who wrote "A Climber's Guide to the Teton Range" was a mathematician. Lots of STEM nuts are into climbing; seems way harder to climb at a high level than solve Gaussian integrals, however.

I bet I could teach any 5.13a climber how to solve the Gaussian integral faster than they could teach me to climb 5.13a...

Teton Climberwrote:

 Lots of STEM nuts are into climbing

Agree that STEM types are into climbing.  Another guy in my department here at CU is a very gifted young researcher (and basically a mathematician despite being in the CS department) as well as a winner of a Piolet d'Or (basically the Nobel Prize of mountaineering).  (https://www.colorado.edu/cs/jed-brown , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piolet_d%27Or )  He can rock climb as well, though I'm not sure about 13a sport.

Nerd

Ben Horowitzwrote:

I bet I could teach any 5.13a climber how to solve the Gaussian integral faster than they could teach me to climb 5.13a...

You're leveraging the fact that said 13a climber likely has had a decade plus of math training (starting from age 5) including algebra and possibly pre-calc and calc.  Imagine teaching a Sentinelese ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese ) how to solve this integral... it would take years, right?  She would probably climb 13a in less time.

It's just that we teach math to our children throughout their younger years, but we don't teach every kid how to climb, so a good climber seems more impressive.

Teton Climberwrote:

JG seemed to feel there is a mental connection between math & climbing problems. I will assume he means unrelated to the physics of protection, etc. He can chime in. 

Leigh Ortenburger who wrote "A Climber's Guide to the Teton Range" was a mathematician. 

For me it was the pleasure of exploration and posing and solving problems that I experienced in both math and climbing. Not the mathematics itself. In math research you are always conjecturing, then using your imagination to verify your conjectures. A lot of "aha!" moments, like on the rock. Piecing together the proof of a theorem as one might "solve" a climbing problem. My old friend rgold was a math person, perhaps he will chime in. And I keep in biweekly touch with Dave Rearick who retired from the CU math dept about 1990. Also Robert F. (Bob)Williams, last heard of at the Institute of Advanced Studies - probably the sharpest of our small math/climbing group.

Statistics tends to be more about analyzing data than proving theorems, although there is overlap with traditional math. I thought that Leigh told me back in the 1960s that he worked mostly in statistics. rgold may have a more accurate memory.

John Gillwrote:

I thought that Leigh told me back in the 1960s that he worked mostly in statistics. rgold may have a more accurate memory.

I have no idea how Leigh would characterize his own work but utilizing statistics seems most likely given his work for GTE's Sylvania. I just reference his bio from the Stanford Archives in regards to a photo exhibit (Cordillera Blanca Range in Peru).

"Leigh Ortenburger (1929-1991) climbed and photographed for more than forty years in the world's greatest mountain ranges. He graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 1952 with a degree in mathematics, and earned a master’s degree in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1953 and a second in statistics from Stanford in 1963, where he did additional work toward a Ph.D. He worked several years as a Teton mountain guide and served a two-year stint in the Army before settling into a career as a mathematician with Sylvania." 

Edit: "The army put him to work doing computer modeling of chemical warfare. This made use of statistics and operations research methods, which would help him in his eventual career. In the fall of 1957, he reported for his first and only job at GTE Sylvania in Mtn. View, CA, where he would work for the next 30 years. His work was highly classified, but it can be said now that it involved electronic countermeasures and he became an expert in predicting the propagation of radio waves in the earth's atmosphere."

John RBwrote:

You're leveraging the fact that said 13a climber likely has had a decade plus of math training (starting from age 5) including algebra and possibly pre-calc and calc.  Imagine teaching a Sentinelese ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese ) how to solve this integral... it would take years, right?  She would probably climb 13a in less time.

It's just that we teach math to our children throughout their younger years, but we don't teach every kid how to climb, so a good climber seems more impressive.

It is a bit more complex than that, since the way mathematics is taught in schools is so poor that many people actively dislike math and are conditioned to think they are "bad" at math. In many ways it might be easier to work with someone who doesn't have that stigma. Obviously with the Sentinelese there is also the communication barrier which would probably take a long time to work through... Hard for me to intuit which one would be easier there. :P Climbing is arguably the more "natural" thing for our bodies to do relative to calculus however.

My tick list supports the notion that math was my worst subject in school. 

Ten year climber

Fifty+ year math guy

There’s no correlation 

Ted Kaczynsky was a math guy too.

Drederekwrote:

Ted Kaczynsky was a math guy too.

And puppy lover you guys are in some terrible company!

A V wrote:

I bet he would have been a great crazy aid climber if somebody taught him how to tinker with pitons and hooks.

It would given him something to do while mumbling to himself - instead of that whack phase that he had with making bombs and mailing them…

I think we'd just have Jim Beyer but we already have a Jim Beyer, so that's a waste.

Long Rangerwrote:

I think we'd just have Jim Beyer but we already have a Jim Beyer, so that's a waste.

My Favorite:

In 1998, my ...hectic hell called life totally melted down. It seemed like a good time to leave town before I went down in a gun battle with police. The Tetons were an appealing destination, and my probation officer agreed to give me a travel permit as long as I continued my weekly anger-management classes. I hadn’t spent any real time in the Tetons in 15 years and was somewhat apprehensive that I might find my home range cruelly twisted by modem “progress.” I was pleasantly surprised to find that this geographically secluded alpine arena was still an uncorrupted gem. JB

Sorry for the detour.

You can't grunt scream and muscle through a math problem which of course is the only point of climbing

I wonder if solving differential equations would be easier if I take my shirt off, wear really tight shoes, and grunt