"Sharp Smart" and "Round Smart"
In which I wrestle with the tension between our respective admiration of STEM and arts & humanities
A debate
I team-teach a course called “Gender and Mathematics” with a mathematician—as in, someone with a Ph.D. in mathematics—who contends vehemently that he isn’t smart.
I’m guessing (hoping) you’re thinking, “What?”
Because all mathematicians are smart, right?
This same person contends that, unlike him, I am smart. Which I will not deny. In fact, for better or worse, it’s a central part of my identity and I get surprisingly prickly when it’s insinuated that I’m not smart. (The prickliness is a character flaw—vanity?pride?) We have this conversation at least once a year, and here’s roughly how it goes:
Him: “Well, you know a ton of stuff I don’t know.”
Me: “Sure, when it comes to the things you think of educated people knowing. But you’re a lot better at math than I am.”
Him: “No, I’ve just studied more of it.1 Because it’s what I’m good at. But that doesn’t mean I’m smart. I don’t read. I don’t even like reading.”
Me: “So I’m more ‘cultured’ than you are. So what? I remember a lot of things I’ve read and studied, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to smarts.”
You see what’s going on here, right? We’re completely talking past each other.2
A distinction (?)
That’s because we’re defining “smart” in at least two different ways. I’m associating being smart with being good at math, which means I’m thinking of it in terms of logic, problem-solving, precise definition, etc. I’ve nicknamed this “sharp smart.” My colleague associates being smart with classic/deep/“important” cultural knowledge. I’ve nicknamed this “round smart.”3
“Sharp smart” involves the things we stereotypically associate with mathematicians and scientists, people who work in fields reputed to be clean and clear (though I’m well aware that this is not the case).
“Round smart” involves a lot of cultural knowledge, understanding the human condition, comfort with ambiguity, etc.—arts and humanities, roughly.
On a personal level, this debate is silly and we both know it. But it comes up because in a broader context, it isn’t quite so silly. That context is our cultural understanding of mathematics and humanities/arts respectively.
The main text we use on the humanities side of the Gender & Math course is Sara Hottinger’s Inventing the Mathematician: Gender, Race, and Our Cultural Understanding of Mathematics. Hottinger’s central claim is that “mathematics plays a significant role in the construction of normative Western subjectivity and in the constitution of the West itself” (6). In more straightforward English: she contends that math is a large part of how people in the West are “supposed” to encounter the world—and more than that, she’s claiming that the way the West defines itself is shaped in large part by mathematics.4
That’s a huge claim, and it’s easy to meet it with a fair amount of skepticism. Hottinger wrote a whole book to defend the claim, and her case is too much to survey here. But her point in a teeny-tiny nutshell is that in the West, math = reason = the right way to meet the world. And the effect of that set of associations (that “discursive construction,” to use the jargon) is that it elevates (a) math and logic over other ways of knowing, and also (b) white men5 above everybody else because they’re most closely associated with reason.
So if, as I expect, you were surprised at the beginning of this post that a mathematician (who does happen to be a white male) claims he isn’t smart, that’s because of cultural associations like these. People who can do fancy math are smart and naturally talented, right? Fast, clear-thinking, clever. Good at problem solving. Sharp smart.
Compare “round smart,” the way I infer my colleague must be thinking about smarts. It’s slow, classic. You have to read whole books, and poetry, and study history and philosophy and art: “high culture.” Round smarts build up over years. It feels to me more like passive knowledge—understanding and remembering things—than active, figuring-things-out intelligence. (Of course, where does understanding come from, if not figuring things out?)
I’m talking in stereotypes here, trying to get a feel for a distinction that seems to be operating but that might not hold up to scrutiny (doesn’t really, though it’s instructive). Other stereotypical associations with sharp smarts include social awkwardness, independence/loneliness, nerdiness, competition, emotional coolness, objectivity, etc. They’re standing outside the world and studying it. Stereotypes for round smarts include cultural and social sophistication (being “above” or at least apart from popular culture), connection and understanding, subjectivity, and (maybe?) emotional warmth. They’re standing squarely within the world.
Brilliance can fit in both camps, but I think “brilliant mathematician/scientist” is a different thing in most of our minds from “brilliant writer/artist.” The brilliant scientist penetrates the mysteries of nature. The brilliant artist synthesizes insight about the human condition. Stereotypically, they both tend to stand apart from the rest of us, but I suspect that’s a matter of “brilliance,” not which type.
The big picture and more nuance
In reality—and I’d really like to emphasize this—these distinctions I’m attempting to tease apart are not mutually exclusive. A person—like me, for instance, who has advanced degrees in both logic and philosophy—can be both sharp smart and round smart. My colleague is clearly sharp smart (though he doesn’t claim even that, given that there are “better” mathematicians than he is)6, and I stubbornly contend that he’s more round smart than he gives himself credit for. The point is, people can be good at many things. This is the point of a liberal arts education.
Furthermore, the skills involved in being both sharp and round smart overlap considerably: reading literature and philosophy involves quite as much logic and analysis as scientific or mathematical investigation do. Creativity and imagination are useful in science and math just as much as they are in the arts and humanities. “Understanding” comes from breaking things apart and putting them back together, and it’s done in every domain. Everything informs everything else.
Nevertheless, I don’t think our silly debate signifies nothing. Hottinger’s claim is that culturally, we tend to dichotomize, and the associations we have with what I’m calling sharp smarts both elevate that set of qualities over round smarts and tend to exclude anyone who doesn’t identify with the former and all its associations.
Dichotomies like this make real differences in the choices people make about who they are and what to study, even though they break down considerably when pressed. Because we tend to view people who are drawn to math and science as more rational and hence “better” in important ways than people who are drawn to arts and literature, people who are not comfortable with the cultural connotations of a given domain will tend to feel less at home there. That causes them move away from it even if they are interested in it, all else held equal. This happens: women leave STEM fields at greater rates than men,7 and men leave a field when it comes to be perceived as “feminine.”
This makes it especially significant that someone with bona fide “sharp smart” credentials would elevate “round smarts” to such an extent as to deny being smart at all—and that he’d do so in a world that is increasingly against supporting arts and humanities education because it’s “useless.”
In the bigger picture, what’s fascinating about this real-not-real distinction is that it points to tensions within our cultural understanding of sharp and round smarts and their associated domains of knowledge. I don’t think Hottinger is wrong about the way reason—and hence math—is elevated above so much else, culturally speaking. But this sits alongside, maybe at cross-purposes with, another thread in which people who are educated in the arts and humanities are thought of (and railed against) as “elite.”
The lesson I draw is that as a matter of fact, and with good reason, we value round smarts, humanities, and the arts just as highly as we do their contrasting counterparts. It’s almost as if we value more than one thing and nothing is black and white. Who knew?
For the record, I do have a math-adjacent degree: an M.S. in Logic and Computation. So I’m no slouch at math myself. But—well, the rest of the post will get to the “but.”
Why do we keep having this conversation, given that it never goes anywhere? I have no idea.
I’m not fully certain why these nicknames were what occurred to me. Math is pointy? Philosophy is curvy? Stereotypes about steely science labs vs. cozy old libraries probably play into it. Let’s not worry too much about the names.
I’ll leave that second part of the claim and its implications aside for the rest of this post. There’s plenty to say just about the first part.
White, able-bodied, cisgendered, heterosexual, upper-(middle)-class, etc. men.
This is actually a part of mathematical culture that we discuss in class: the idea that a “real” mathematician is someone brilliant, to whom math comes easily.
I have lots of articles about this if you want them, but the Nature article in the link provides a good overview.
I see a different way to look at this distinction of sharp vs round smart. I was actually thinking about this quite a bit, partially from a medical standpoint. To me, it seems that all of us fall somewhere on the spectrum with regards to our prefrontal cortical development. Those with a relatively thick prefrontal cortex tend to be emotionally very stable and cool, have excellent attention, are not easily bored by repetitive tedious tasks (like Lego or puzzles, for instance), and have good motor control. Those with a relatively “underdeveloped” prefrontal cortex might remain “childish” in some ways: clumsy, emotionally unstable, inattentive, and easily bored with repetitive tasks they are not very interested in. A person with a thick prefrontal cortex could have some autistic traits that might be highly beneficial in the academic setting. Someone with a thinner prefrontal cortex might have attention issues and, as a result, might not do as well academically, but there is a silver lining to the “wandering brain”: creativity. This is just a big speculation and there are definitely many other variables involved, but I think the closer you are to ADHD, the more creative and inventive you are. On the other hand, if you are closer to the autism spectrum, creativity might be less pronounced. Perhaps your distinction of sharp vs round smart when comparing people of roughly similar intelligence/IQ, comes down to how creative and innovative one is, based on where they fall on the autism-ADHD spectrum, regardless of the field they are working in?
This makes me think that it is not the skills themselves, but who is using these talents to do what type of work. Science has long dominated knowledge production, and is associated with masculinity. Baking is also a science, but when done in the home (gender coded as feminine) for the sustenance of people, is seen as less important. Brewing is also thought to be scientific, and guess who does it and how it is perceived? Or take the way that Philosophy is divided into epistemology/metaphysics, and the normative side with ethics/politics/aesthetics. Who goes where? And it’s not just a matter of keeping one side outside what is valued and often better paid, but of allowing those on the inside to only do epistemology or science, or computer engineering, without being bothered with the social, historical, political, and ethical effects of the work they do.