I have often said that my favorite way to sort objects is alphabetically by color name. For example, if your objects are colored red, yellow, green, blue, and purple, then you would put the blue one first, followed by green, then purple, red, and finally yellow.

But why? Partly for humor. I think it’s funny to do something in a very particular way for no reason whatsoever. It is an expression of the absurd: ultimately there is no “reason” for humans to do anything, yet we toil away with the greatest care as if the sun will never explode and consume the earth. The point of absurdist comedy, in my opinion, is not to portray nonsensical situations that are totally unlike reality, but rather to portray the ways in which reality itself is nonsensical. Meticulously sorting objects is absurd.

Additionally, I relish nonsense for its own sake. There is something fascinating and strangely satisfying about nonsense to me. It’s part of why I enjoy higher math. When I was an undergraduate I would often finish a page of homework, step back, and look at the entire page without reading any of it. It was fascinating to me that I wrote and understood everything on the page, and yet could also see it as if through another person’s eyes for whom the entire thing is a totally incomprehensible, undecipherable jumble of symbols. For anyone who was not a math major, it was marginally less readable than hieroglyphics.

This is something people hate about math, and yet I love it. It is not out of any sense of superiority or elitism, either. Every subject or indeed any area of interest has associated with it a variety of specialized symbols and jargon. An advanced biological anthropology textbook or a conversation about fantasy sports has the same bewildering effect on me, and I likewise appreciate it, even without being able to discern the meaning. Even foreign languages fit into this. It’s so interesting to me that the same information is comprehensible to one person and totally nonsensical to another. It’s a reminder, I think, that everything is fundamentally nonsense; only by bringing in outside knowledge, a special “lens,” can anything be meaningful.

Absurdist mathematics

Absurdism is working very hard to (knowingly) do something that is unnecessary or has no purpose. Excessive use of complicated symbols is one example, shown above. Statistics provides ample opportunities for producing nonsense, like: What is the average zip code? Or the average phone number? Which has the larger standard deviation, zip codes or phone numbers? What is the most common middle digit in three-digit apartment numbers?

Ideally, absurd nonsense should be comprehensible on some level. It’s something that can be meaningful, but it doesn’t make any sense to do. This is as opposed to mere gobbledygook or outright logical impossibilities, which are boring and not absurd.

The absurdity of word problems in math is frequently derided. What is Francis going to do with 40 watermelons? I say make word problems even more absurd. Erase the misconception that word problems are the same thing as real-world application problems. These things use related skills, but word problems are just meaningless practice.

In fact, most school math is absurd. Why multiply 58 by 35 on a worksheet? There is no reason. No one wants to know the answer. No one cares what the answer is. The idea of practice in itself is perfectly reasonable, but the specific instances of practice are inherently pointless, contrived problems. So, then, if we are resigned to making students carry out such practice, let’s hang a lampshade on it. Students will never be confused about the reality of a situation that does not comport with reality at all. Let’s find out the cost to carpet the ceiling. Let’s have a store that sells only ice cream and live insects. Let’s see what happens when the moon crashes into Mars. Students don’t use school math for things in their daily lives the way it is often portrayed in word problems. (I would be all for using math for actual real-world problems, but curricula largely appear to be sticking with word problems.)

Finding the Zen

We can create meaning from anything. Mundane or pointless tasks can be rewarding. Try doing something in an unnecessarily difficult way. Try washing your house with a toothbrush. Why? Because you choose to. We are all Sisyphus pushing our rock up the hill before it rolls down again. Why despair at the pointlessness of our effort when we can choose to push the rock anyway? If everything is meaningless, then everything is meaningful. All the incomprehensible nonsense in the world is positively rife with meaning– you just have to bring your own from home.