A conservative friend suggested banning all adjectives — removing identifiers altogether. Example: “Conservative”. Adjectives that signal our opinion of a person, and sometimes just that. Relying on them magnifies the difference, shrinks the complexity, and puts the emphasis on the label instead.
Maybe that’s why during the Ketanji Brown Jackson hearings, I found myself baffled by how the media identified her as mostly just the First Black Woman—yes, but also according to a in a way, in general. The First Black Woman: Those are all the major milestones, the identity that really matters, of course. It’s just that sometimes they seem to drown out so much else about her. Some people have never gotten past the First Black Woman (certainly the ones who turned the page when they saw HERS).
As a “senior”, my identity was established in the blink of an eye. The secretaries at the co-op couldn’t distinguish me from the other white-haired women waiting to take their orders. Up to twenty, seventy are all the same. (Twenty things might also look quite similar to us.)
Teaching request I struggled with identity. Students ask: How should we address you? A friend gave his student two choices: name or Your Majesty. I love it. But nowadays, I find most of my students prefer to use “professor”, because that is my identity to them. I don’t really identify as “professor”, but that’s okay.
It’s about identity. It changes over space and time. “Hers” doesn’t mean what it did 30 years ago. At the same time, I had trouble locating my reckless forty, who was rollerblading around Manhattan. (The lobby of Trump Tower is the best spot in town.) A friend sent me a photo from a few years ago, speaking at several events. “That was when I used to be someone,” I wrote back. “That’s when you used to be a different person,” he replied.
Sometimes, mine primary identity is “mother”. My cat, rightly so, probably identifies me as a “can opener”.
Even so, my identity does not mean that I am identical to other “can openers,” like a cat sitter — or that I identify myself as a “can opener.” Even identical twins may not be identified as identical. A person who can be identified as an “Olympic athlete”; the other, “felony.”
In mathematics, identity is something very specific. Euler’s identity is certainly best known: I once saw it engraved on the license plate of a pickup truck in Anchorage. It appeared on The Simpsons more than once. A scientist friend suggested me a suitable tattoo.
Part of the appeal is that Euler’s identity has an all-star cast—all great numbers!
0: destroyer; it makes everything nil or infinite.
1: unity, a self-identity!
pi: ratio of circumference to diameter, irrational and never ending. (The first three digits are Einstein’s date of birth.)
e: transcendental, visible everywhere, a limited, inaccessible, derivative of itself.
I: imaginary, square root of minus one: √ (-1).
Put them together and you get: e I pi + 1 = 0. In English, multiply I times pi then raise e with that power. Miraculously, it’s zero. Incredible!
