The Boyd Orr Centre, or: What is a Severed Horse Leg?
Posted by Tom Leinster
Earlier this year I joined the Boyd Orr Centre for Population and Ecosystem Health, at the kind invitation of my friend Richard Reeve in biology. ‘But Tom,’ I hear you say, ‘what do you know about population or ecosystem health?’ Fair question. But the Boyd Orr people are marvellously welcoming, and many of us share an interest in the quantification of biodiversity, so there I am.
I hope to tell you some time about my work on diversity with Christina Cobbold. Right now I want to talk about the incredibly interdisciplinary nature of the Boyd Orr Centre, and how that makes a mathematician feel.
The Boyd Orr Centre does not (yet) have a physical manifestation: it’s a virtual centre within the University of Glasgow, a group of people with common interests. It’s named after the intrepid, idealistic, spectacularly energetic John Boyd Orr. Here are some choice quotes from this potted biography:
John Boyd Orr (known as Popeye to his family) was a visionary researcher, decorated war veteran, Nobel Peace Prize winner, political idealist and activist, and devoted supporter of this University. He was born in Kilmaurs in 1880. He graduated from the University of Glasgow with an arts degree, taught briefly (‘though I liked the children, I hated teaching them’), before enrolling for two further degrees in biology and medicine (‘it would have been exceedingly difficult to get a job with only a science degree…’).
On his Nobel Peace Prize:
Boyd Orr’s work was fuelled by a burning resentment of human injustice, and an intense frustration that the lessons of basic science were so ineffectively applied to the alleviation of human suffering. As the chairman of the Nobel committee observed: ‘The purpose of his scientific work was to find ways of making men healthier and happier so as to secure peace; he believes that healthy and happy men have no need to resort to arms in order to expand and acquire living space.’ Boyd Orr himself wrote ‘We must conquer hunger and want, because hunger and want in the midst of plenty are a fatal flaw and a blot on our civilization.’
[…] it was the appalling living conditions he witnessed in Glasgow as a student, and, later, his observations during his travels for the Food and Agriculture Organization that reinforced to Boyd Orr the necessity of ‘bringing science to politics’.
The Wikipedia article quotes words of his that may provoke a hollow laugh:
His research output suffered from the time and energy he had to devote to fund-raising, and in later life he said, ‘I still look with bitter resentment at having to spend half my time in the humiliating job of hunting for money for the Institute.’
More on fund-raising later in this post…
Unfortunately, the University saw fit to honour Boyd Orr by naming after him its biggest, ugliest building. To generations of students and staff, the words Boyd Orr mean only one thing: this gloomy great hulk of rain-stained concrete that looms over an otherwise rather pleasant neighbourhood. The Boyd Orr Centre has nothing to do with the building; it’s much newer, but more of a credit to his name.
I got involved with the Centre when I went to one of their meetings in May, on diversity. I was amazed by the breadth of people there, all members apart from me, and all with some interest in measuring diversity. Among others, there were field ecologists, genetics and genomics researchers, parasitologists, livestock breeding experts, a microbial engineer, mathematical modellers, and two qualified veterinary surgeons.
Richard Reeve, who invited me, has a background in mathematics and artificial intelligence, and now specializes in vaccines and the diversity of pathogens. Chris Quince, who I got talking to over lunch, knows all about the diversity of the microbes in your gut. Tim Parkin, who I met during the coffee break, is an expert on racehorse injuries, and has therefore spent many hours examining the severed legs of dead horses.
The interdisciplinarity was a big kick. For a mathematician it’s an eye-opener: here are people from at least half a dozen university departments, exchanging serious scientific ideas. It must take good leadership to build a group with such a positive and welcoming culture, where experts in subject A listen to and engage with experts from subject B. We’ve all seen experts on subject A shooting down any outsider who dares to encroach on their territory, or reveals a less than thorough knowledge of A.
Apart from the excitement of the meeting, and what I learned about diversity from it, a couple of things really struck me. Both are about interdisciplinarity.
First there was the simple fact that it was possible to communicate. More than that, it was possible to communicate well. The members of the Centre are probably well-practised at explaining themselves to non-experts, but even so. Take two mathematicians at random, and I’m not convinced that, on average, they’d communicate that well.
But that’s not a criticism of mathematicians. The fact is, I have a better understanding of what a severed horse leg looks like than what, say, harmonic analysis looks like, even though I know nothing special about the former and am quite curious about the latter. It’s simply a feature of mathematics that one can have next to no understanding of the research of the person in the office next door. But there are parts of the life sciences about which we all know rather a lot, simply through our daily experience.
And that brings me to the second, depressing, thought. These days—in the UK and, I believe, large parts of the world— there is enormous pressure to be inter/multi/cross/trans-disciplinary. Funding bodies increasingly want to give you money only if you’re joining up subjects in a novel way, rather than drilling deep into the mysteries of some established field. At some point during the Boyd Orr meeting I looked around the room and thought: mathematicians are stuffed. This is what the managers mean when they talk about interdisciplinarity. How can we explain to them the gulfs that separate different parts of mathematics? How can we explain that it might be easier for a commutative algebraist to read a paper on ecology than a paper on non-commutative algebra?
Anyway, I don’t want to finish on that depressing note. I’m happy to have joined the Boyd Orr Centre, I’m optimistic about the opportunities, and I feel lucky to have stumbled into it.
Re: The Boyd Orr Centre, or: What is a Severed Horse Leg?
I have thought often about the difficulty of non-experts to understand mathematics. Imagine, for instance, that you are at a restaurant and overhear a conversation at the next table. I think that if the subject of the conversation were history or philosophy, chemistry or physics, you would recognize this. Now imagine that the next table overhears your conversation about your favorite piece of mathematics (say higher categories in homotopy theory). I would surprised if anyone besides another mathematician or maybe a physicist would recognize that you are talking mathematics rather than gibberish.
However, I’m not sure I agree with the comment about a commutative algebraist having an easier time understanding ecology than noncommutative algebra. This very much depends on what you mean by understand. It is certainly easier to nod my head about ecology than it is to nod my head about Ngo’s proof of the Fundamental Lemma, but I don’t understand and haven’t yet tried to understand either in a serious way. I would guess that, all things considered, ecology is actually far more complicated than the Fundamental Lemma and that I have a better chance of *understanding* the latter. But that’s not to say that one shouldn’t make a good go at ecology.