Math is not a sport

Jordan Ellenberg has a Slate column on whether math should be considered a sport. Sounds preposterous? Ellenberg points out that in 1997, then-president of the International Olympic Committee Juan Antonio Samaranch declared, “Bridge is a sport, and as such your place is here, like all other sports.” Chess was an exhibition sport at the Sydney games. There is such a thing as the International Mathematical Olympiad. Why not math? This got me to thinking about George Carlin’s philosophy about sports. There’s the classic riff on the differences between baseball and football and the underrated follow-on about why other “sports” are not really sports in Playin’ With Your Head. Which made me realize that Ellenberg is only able to engage in this debate because a lot of activities that count as sports really are not (to be fair, he comes to the same conclusion by the end of the article). What really stood out, however, was this passage from Ellenberg’s essay:

In my high school you could letter in [math]…. Not that you’d mistake these kids for the campus jocks—when I competed at the Olympiad, there were plenty of skinny eccentrics, with a promiscuous hippie here and there, and not a little subclinical autism spectrum. But the math stars display the focused confidence of athletes, even, at times, adopting Deion-style swagger. Honesty compels me to confess that my high-school math team was called the “Hell’s Angles”; that we wore matching black T-shirts advertising this fact; and that we entered each match in file behind our captain, who carried on his shoulder a boombox playing “Hip To Be Square.”

Honesty compels me to confess that:

1) I was on the math team at my high school — In fact, I was the captain my senior year; 2) None of us ever exhibited any kind of “Deion-like swagger.” 3) If I had somehow convinced my teammates to wear black shirts saying “Hell’s Angels,” ten minutes later I would have found my entire team in the nurse’s office after they got the crap kicked out of them. [Ellenberg’s shirt said “Hell’s Angles”–ed. Replace “ten minutes” with “fifteen minutes.”]

To be fair to Ellenberg, he had reason for swagger — I recall running into the Montgomery County math wizards when I qualified for the American Regions Math League contest, and they were the best of the best. [Oh, sure you remember this — any confirming evidence?–ed. God bless the World Wide Web — someone actually posted the results of the 1985 competition, of which I was a participant. Sure enough Montgomery County won that year — my team (Connecticut A) finished a respectible eighth.] UPDATE: Another blogger responds to Ellenberg: “[A]s a former mathlete, i say, ‘hell no! i’m not a jock! stop calling me a jock! if you don’t stop insinuating that i’m a jock, your firewall’s gonna be so full of java that your ROMs will overload!'”