The mathematician David Bessis claims that everyone is capable of, and can benefit greatly from, mathematical thinking.

David Bessis was drawn to mathematics for the same reason that many people are driven away: He didn’t understand how it worked. Unlike other creative processes, like making music, which can be heard, or painting pictures, which can be seen, math is for the most part an internal process, hidden from view. “It sounded a bit magical. I was intrigued,” he said.

His curiosity eventually led him to pursue a doctoral degree in math at Paris Diderot University in the late 1990s. He spent the next decade studying geometric group theory before leaving research mathematics and founding a machine learning startup in 2010.

Through it all, he never stopped questioning what it actually means to do math. Bessis wasn’t content to simply solve problems. He wanted to further interrogate — and help other people understand — how mathematicians think about and practice their craft.

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