Dr. Francis Su’s Commencement Address
Thank you Allison. Good morning: Members of the Board, Teachers, Staff, Parents, Students, and especially the Graduating Class of 2025!
What a joyous day! I’m honored to be back, celebrating with you. When I came to Wheeler last year, I knew you were enthusiastic, because afterwards some of you asked me to autograph your calculators! Yes, some celebrities sign baseballs. I sign TI-84’s. Being a math professor is like being a celebrity: people either seem afraid of me, or they scream when they see me. I get fan mail too… but it always ends with “Can you bump my grade?”
Did you know Mary Wheeler, your school founder, taught both math and Latin? That’s amazing because they’re the only two subjects where students ask: “when am I ever going to use this?” But she understood that both subjects are more than just their content—they help students pay attention to structure, and to meaning. In other words, math is more than just calculations, that any old computer can do. I think of math as a frame for shaping your affections and your character, and helping you flourish as human beings.
Speaking of which, I have a confession. This morning, I accidentally dropped your diplomas and mixed them up completely. When you come forward, you may or may not get your own diploma! What do you think the chances are of the ultimate disaster: that NOBODY gets the right diploma?
Here’s the same problem in a more fun way: when you toss your caps at the end of this ceremony and each catch a random cap, what are the chances that NO caps return to their original owners?
Let’s vote. What do you think the chances of no “fixed caps”?
- Very small, almost 0%
- Very large, almost 100%
- Somewhere in the middle
Second question: With more people, does this chance go up, go down, or stay about the same? I’ll reveal the answer at the end.
I’d like to share four words that describe both doing math, and doing life: transformation, perspiration, contemplation, and illumination.
Transformation. You’re here today because you passed tests–not just academic ones. You’ve learned to train your minds, bodies, and emotions to navigate relationships and ideas that didn’t exist for you in middle school. You’ve grown your capacity for friendship and connection.
I wasn’t as fortunate in high school, often feeling socially ostracized and deeply insecure. I wondered if I could ever be loved. But teachers were my lifeline, introducing me to writers and scholars who showed me I wasn’t alone in my struggles. When my English teacher introduced me to the play Cyrano de Bergerac, I realized that others wrestled with self-doubts too. Education helped me process life more richly.
In math, the word transformation describes changing relationships—like who gets whose diploma after our mix-up! Your high school journey has been about transformation: changing your relationship to the world, learning your powers, and becoming “answerable for their use”, as your school mission states.
That journey doesn’t end here! Like math, life is a series of transformations–always learning, always growing toward a richer understanding of your powers and responsibilities. How can you navigate this transformation with wisdom and care? That’s where the next words come in.
Perspiration. Both math and life can be challenging, and pushing through requires perspiration. You’ll face personal ordeals—at my graduation, my dad had cancer, and my mom had Lou Gehrig’s disease. Our family spent years in an emotional wilderness. Hard things happen.
Beyond personal struggles, the world faces hard problems: climate change, political polarization, managing the promise and perils of the AI revolution. All revolve around knowing your powers and being answerable for their use.
But math teaches us something crucial about difficulty. Many people think if math is hard, then “they’re not cut out for it”. Mathematicians, however, think the opposite! Math isn’t about the result–it’s about the struggle to get there. You GROW by sweating through problems you can’t solve.
Looking at our cap-tossing problem, you might throw up your hands—or roll up your sleeves and do the hard work to determine what’s going on. Through perspiration, you become better at figuring out why you’re stuck. You improvise workarounds, you innovate new approaches. Perspiration makes you comfortable in the struggle. Just as athletes crave sore muscles, the math trained mind learns to relish being stuck. Perspiration makes you better at solving other hard problems, even if you never completely solve the problem you started with!
And perspiration prepares you for meeting other challenges in your life. When I couldn’t swim in high school, a bully tried to drown me in swim class. Teachers moved me to the only other PE option: swim team practice! I was the guy who couldn’t swim, training with the swim team. But through that challenge and perspiration, I finally learned.
Of course, not all the hard problems in your life will be solvable, but perspiration teaches us how to live in the midst of that with courage and conviction. As Teddy Roosevelt said in another tumultuous time: “I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life; I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.” Perspiration prepares you for living with courage and integrity.
Contemplation. In both math and life, true reward comes through contemplation. In posing questions that ignite our curiosity and seeing how they speak to other other areas of our lives. The cap-tossing problem connects to how to design a sports tournament with adequate mixing, or designing surveys to mitigate bias by rotating the order of questions. Math is thinking deeply about simple truths.
Similarly, your life will be richer if you contemplate the big questions:
- What should I do with my life?
- How do I measure success?
- Is TikTok’s algorithm reading our minds, or do we all just have the same 3 thoughts?
- What is the chief end of humankind? Money? Power? Achievement? Or something different?
Life won’t answer these questions for you. When I got to college, I wrestled with this big question: with all the turmoil in my family, why was I pursuing an education? Doing so made me more clear eyed about what I wanted out of college.
Without contemplation, you’ll move like an automaton from one thing to the next, listening to music you don’t like, taking jobs you don’t want, feeling unfulfilled because you never figured out what makes you tick. Contemplation is the key to your flourishing.
So when you get to college, don’t be satisfied with surface-level knowledge. Don’t be utterly reliant on ChatGPT to think for you. Think deeply about simple truths. Ask hard questions of your antagonists, and your friends. Work hard to figure out what’s really true—we need that in this day and age. Grow in wisdom, not just knowledge. Contemplate now—so come crisis or crunch time, your desired actions come second nature. Contemplation prepares you for wise living.
Illumination. Pursue it, in math and in life. Math shapes society, but it also shapes people—to receive joy when they truly understand something deeply. That illumination often comes from seeing an idea from multiple perspectives.
Here’s a surprising truth about our cap-tossing problem: the chance that no cap returns to its owner is… about 37% and that number doesn’t change with a hundred graduates or a thousand! And that 37% actually comes from dividing 1 by the number e (about 2.718), a mysterious number that appears in exponential growth like compound interest, and in probabilities of rare events. That’s also surprising because the cap toss seems to have nothing to do with these things!
But when you change your point of view: recognizing that getting your own cap back is a rare event when you have many people, or realizing those probabilities compound just like negative interest—suddenly e seems natural. In math, multiple perspectives illuminate how ideas connect.
Life is like this, too. Don’t just seek knowledge, seek illumination. Seek to understand things deeply. Seek multiple points of view. Wouldn’t we be in a better place as a nation if we all got better at seeing things from other people’s points of view?
And this illumination keep us from error. In math, we learn to ask: “is our answer reasonable?” to keep our calculations in check. Yet we’re living through an AI revolution where machine learning uses math to see patterns humans cannot. This power can cure diseases and help doctors develop breakthrough treatments—but it can also be misused. When AI systems make big decisions in your workplace or home, only the humans who’ve developed true understanding will recognize when AI goes astray. As Wheeler graduates, you must help us be answerable for its use. These AI tools can be our partners, but don’t let them be your master. If you grow too reliant on these tools, you will never know what you are capable of, you will always be insecure about what you can really do by yourself. The only way to avoid being taken over by the machines is to lean on your humanness— by seeking deep understanding.
So that’s my encouragement: to seek transformation, perspiration, contemplation and illumination. These words might guide you in math should you choose more of it, but I know they will guide you in life.
Continue your journey of transformation: always learning and growing as you discover your powers and become answerable for their use..
Relish the worthiness of perspiration: seeking to do hard things, because they prepare you for inevitable challenges.
Set aside time for contemplation of life’s big questions, so when crisis hits, your desired response is second nature.
And seek the joy of illumination: seek to know simple truths deeply. That process isn’t always instant, but takes time and it takes a community around to see multiple perspectives.
These words will help you use your powers, and those unlocked by technology, more wisely and responsibly, so that you and those in your care, can flourish.
Congratulations once again to you all, Class of 2025.