Math 4 Wisdom. "Mathematics for Wisdom" by Andrius Kulikauskas.

My Vision of Scholarship

My application to the Let Me Think Scholarship Workshop.

If you make it through round 1 of the Admissions Process, we will be asking you for 3 references

Someone you lived with: Edmundas Kulikauskas
Someone you worked with: John Harland
Someone you studied or thought with: Thomas Gajdosik

We aim for a diverse group of participants in this workshop, with respect to race/ethnicity, gender, ideology, religion, disciplinary affiliation (e.g. STEM, arts, humanities), life experiences, class, age, etc. Please share any information about yourself that you feel would help us with this aim. (optional)

My deepest value in life is "living by truth, and especially, absolute truth". This reflects my lifelong quest to know everything, my efforts to engage God, my honesty and integrity, my intensity. My dedication to absolute truth is lonely. I engage each person as a self-standing independent thinker.

My home is in Lithuania, the land of my heritage. My parents and their parents were refugees and lived in Displaced Person camps in Germany from 1944 to 1950. I was born in 1964 in Santa Monica, California, and grew up in La Palma, Orange County, attending schools which were 40% Mexican-American. Our family was Lithuanian-American, so we were raised to speak Lithuanian at home. We attended Lithuanian Saturday School and Catholic Mass in Lithuanian on Sunday. We participated in Lithuanian Scouts and Lithuanian folk dancing. These activities were 22 miles away, and my parents' friends were all Lithuanian, scattered across many miles, so we grew up in a virtual community of sorts, dedicated to preserving our culture and freeing Soviet-occupied Lithuania. I lived for a total of one year in Soviet-occupied Lithuania, in 1980 and 1987-1989, and moved to Lithuania in 1997, after it gained independence. I live in a rural village, Eiciunai, which has 300 people.

I am a male, I identify as a male, and importantly or not, I grew up in a society where the path from unconscious boyhood to conscious manhood was long and unclear and challenging and signficant and to this day mysterious. I believed that I would find and marry the true love of my life and raise with her a Lithuanian family, but inexplicably that never happened.

For most of my life I identified as blonde, but now concede that my hair is brown, the little hair that I have. Otherwise, I don't identify with any race, but allow myself to be identified as White because it was explained to me that if I identify as Other, then I am hurting minorities. All of my life, I made many efforts to reach out to others, of all backgrounds and perspectives, but especially, to Black-Americans in Chicago, where my grandparents lived. I lived in distraught neighborhoods for several years, including Englewood, where the murder rate was 1 per 1,000 per year.

I identify as a genius, a gift from God, a child of God, able to know and do all things. I have a perfect mind, a good heart and boundless ambition. This is all reflected in my academic presentations https://www.math4wisdom.com/wiki/Research/Writings but also in my leadership as a peacemaker. In 2002, I and Brother David Ellison-Bey coauthored the paper, "An Economy for Giving Everything Away", http://www.ms.lt/papers/2002-An-Economy-For-Giving-Everything-Away.pdf which Chris Messina singled out as the key influence on him when he invented the hashtag #.

In 2008, through my online laboratory Minciu Sodas, I led the Pyramid of Peace, which organized 100 peacemakers on the ground and 100 online assistants to avert genocide in Kenya. http://www.ms.lt/pyramidofpeace/ In 2020, I led a band of eleven Lithuanian and Litvak dissidents which managed to rescue Vilnius's oldest Jewish cemetery from desecration by a 27 million euro construction project. https://defendinghistory.com/lithuania-hears-pleas-and-for-now-cancels-funding-for-convention-center-project-in-old-jewish-cemetery/104576 I am currently developing solutions to bring peace to Russia and Ukraine. https://www.math4wisdom.com/wiki/Exposition/20220922Peacemaking

My father was an electrical engineer and my mother was a children's librarian. We were middle class and then upper middle class. They paid for my college and I paid for my graduate school working as a teaching assistant. After my Ph.D., I never took a full time job but instead worked temporary and/or part-time jobs so that I could focus on my philosophy. After I moved to Lithuania, from 1998 to 2010, as a sole proprietor, I ran my business, Minciu Sodas, for serving and organizing independent thinkers. My debts kept growing, reached $130,000 and I went bankrupt. I have not borrowed any money since then and do not intend to. I have mostly worked for friends or acquaintances who have provided me work.

I identify as a person who is forever learning, thus forever growing, forever living. I would like to learn to write Chinese characters, tell jokes, play keyboards, say blessings in Hebrew and ride a horse.

What is your personal experience with educational/academic institutions?

I taught myself to read when I was three years old. On the first day of kindergarden, they immediately placed me into first grade. The teacher would send me to the library where I would read encyclopedias. In 2nd grade, I wrote a 28 page report on the history of Ancient Egypt. In 3rd grade, I selected and read an 800 page university anthology on African Culture and Civilization. I was blessed with mediocre schools, which gave me plenty of time to study on my own. My high school did not have a calculus class, so I taught myself calculus from a book over the summer and my senior year I took the second year course at Fullerton College.

At the University of Chicago, I sought a general education for my quest to know everything. Each quarter I took one class in math, as the study of structure, necessary to express a new science; I took one class in physics, a successful empirical science; and one class in the humanities and one class in social sciences, to be exposed to the great ideas of human life. Thus I received bachelor degrees in Math and in Physics.

I gained a PhD in Math because I thought it would be the hardest thing to study on my own. At the University of California at San Diego I was exposed to many newly emerging sciences such as transformational grammar, automata theory, experimental psychology, cognitive science, neural networks and neuroscience. After I passed my qualifying exams, I took off for a year of independent study at Vilnius University. 1988-1989 was the year before the Berlin Wall fell down, a dramatic year for Lithuania's independence movement, and for me a year of great progress in my philosophy. Back at UCSD, I was appointed senior teaching assistant, responsible for training the new teaching assistants.

After my PhD in 1993, I moved to Chicago and taught at Ivy League Tutoring, a Black-American owned business serving the Black-American community. I taught there again in 2010-2011. I taught precalculus for one semester, from my own notes, at American University in Bosnia and Hercegovina.

From 2014 to 2022, I gave 40 academic talks in Lithuania and internationally on aspects of my original philosophy. I presented my results in theology, metaphysics, epistemology, phenomenology, existentialism, ethics, values, personal growth, education, psychology, cognitive science, culture, society, linguistics, economics, environment, business innovation, peacemaking, history, biology, aesthetics, poetry, art, music and mathematics. In 2018, I gave three talks at the World Congress of Philosophy in Beijing, China, and three talks at the World Congress of Universal Logic in Vichy, France.

From 2016 to 2018, I was an adjunct professor at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University. In each course, I took the initiative to teach my students how to learn by investigating. In my philosophy class, I taught my students to ask a question they cared about and then design and conduct an investigation to arrive at an answer. In my ethics class, I taught my students to create their own ethical systems regarding what they should do, why they should do it, and how they should get themselves to do it. In my creative writing class, I taught my students how to write a poem and how to write a short story. I gave an academic talk about that, "The Cultivation of Sages in a Consumer Society".

What is your personal experience with intellectual life outside established institutions?

I was an independent thinker from childhood.

When I was six, I decided to dedicate myself to know everything and apply that knowledge usefully. Understanding the spiritual risks, I asked God to give me the freedom to think whatever I need to think, that he was good or bad, that he existed or not, and as for me, regardless of what I learned, I would always believe in him. Then I designed for myself a program of self-education, based on reading, writing and math. I wanted to study history from the very beginning, and was very disappointed that our library had no books on Mesopotomia, so I started with Ancient Egypt.

As I finished high school, I realized that physics would not have the answers because quantum reality was too indefinite for that. And I would not be able to read all books, as I had hoped. So I had to look where the answer could be readily found but nobody wanted to look, which was the study of wisdom. At the University of Chicago, we were encouraged to ask big questions but were discouraged to think anybody could answer them. From the beginning, I went my own way by observing how perspectives such as "free will" and "fate" fit together into cognitive frameworks which I thought of as "divisions of everything". Thus I began to document a language for absolute truth, which is all coming together forty years later.

I kept working on this philosophy, doing hundreds of investigations. In 1996 to 1997, I met with my friends and acquaintances every other week to develop what become "good will exercises" to address situations where the truth of the heart conflicts with the truth of the world. From 1997 to 1998 I led about forty of these exercises. Subsequently, I led a variety of investigatory workshops, showing how we can find answers to a big question by comprehensively sharing and classifying relevant personal experiences, and then structuring and systematizing the resulting categories, arriving at systemic truths.

From 1998 to 2010, I developed Minciu Sodas, an online laboratory for serving and organizing independent thinkers around the world, which had 200 active writers and 2,000 readers in about 20 working groups. I collected answers from 700 people regarding their deepest value in life - they were all different! and the questions they wished to investigate. This "Orchard of Thoughts" had a distinct online culture based on working openly in the Public Domain, appreciating that money brings people together but you can't pay people to care, and insisting that we want all people to succeed. I overviewed our culture with an academic talk, "The Orchard of Thoughts: An Alternative Culture of Growing in Not Knowing" https://www.math4wisdom.com/wiki/Research/20170506PostTruth

In 2009, I summarized my philosophy with a video, "I Wish to Know". Then I collected 200 ways that I had figured things out, classified and systematized them, yielding an epistemology of 24 ways. I sketched out analogous epistemologies for math, physics, chess, biology, neuroscience, and for personalities - Jesus and the Gaon of Vilna.

In 2016, I returned to studying math with the intent of understanding how its many branches, questions, concepts and results unfold. I noticed the cognitive frameworks that I was familiar with.

In 2021, I started working on "Math 4 Wisdom" as a way to make a living through Patreon supporters as I nurture a scientific community to clarify, validate and further the language of wisdom by relating it to the language of mathematics.

What is your personal experience living with other people in the same housing unit (e.g. family, roommates, intentional community)?

I enjoyed living with roommates at university and graduate school from 1982 to 1992. I was very fortunate to become very good friends with some of my roommates and was able to get along with everybody else. I lived with my grandmother from 1993 to 1997 in Chicago. From 1999 to 2007 I lived at the Folk Creativity Center in Vilnius, Lithuania, was the primary supporter financially, and helped keep the Center alive. Organizing independent thinkers from 1998 to 2010, I traveled a lot and stayed with dozens of people and families for weeks at a time. Living with others a key thing is to follow the rules, be considerate, help with chores, keep things clean and tidy, understand when people want to interact and when they don't, be friendly, let people be.

Why do you want to attend this workshop?

I believe this workshop is an opportunity for me to develop Math 4 Wisdom to a higher level. I will learn where my endeavor fits within the broader landscape. I am curious how others are developing scholarship, how that might contribute to my own approach, and with whom my approach will resonate.

In terms of research, I am interested to survey the epistemology of scholarship, to overview and systematize the ways that scholars have figured things out, and then to draw some conclusions about the circumstances which made their achievements possible and meaningful, including the resources, patronage, institutions, cultural circumstances and subsequent consequences, applications and realizations.

I also would like to research the development of cultural movements, notably those which sprung from one individual or just a few individuals. I am curious to appreciate and investigate the paths by which their moral visions grew culturally real.

I wish to find at least a few people who would participate actively at Math 4 Wisdom, possibly amongst the workshop participants but also amongst other contacts I can be making online or on site. In any event, I hope to understand better who might care about Math 4 Wisdom and why.

I want to study and learn how thinkers today succeeded or failed in finding support through Patreon, Kickstarter or other means. I want to find people who want to support me and Math 4 Wisdom. I want to understand what they would want to receive in return for their support

What are your hopes and expectations for attending the workshop?

I hope to expand my network of contacts in many ways. I would treasure finding two or three new active participants at Math 4 Wisdom who would investigate their questions there.

I hope to do meaningful research. Also, I hope to learn about methods of scholarship which are new to me, and also develop and try out new exercises in scholarship, hopefully along with others.

I hope to learn why others see Math 4 Wisdom as meaningful and valuable. I want to understand where Math 4 Wisdom sits within prior and existing efforts to redefine scholarship. I am particularly interested in studying examples where a single person, or a small group of people, sparked a movement with its own culture. I think of Lord Baden-Powell and scouting, Bill W and Dr.Bob and Alcoholics Anonymous, Rabbi Yisrael Lipkin Salanter and the Musar movement, Jean-Henri Dunant and the Red Cross, Jane Addams and the social work profession, and the many monastic movements. Who are the people who embrace the founder's vision and make it socially real? How and why do they do that? What can I learn about that? How can I apply that?

Please discuss your experience with scholarly practices such as reading, writing, deep thinking, deep conversation, art, music, math, science, research, or anything else we have left out.

Throughout my adult life, five or six days per week, I have spent my best hour or more on developing my philosophy.

In 2010, I made a list of about 200 ways that I had figured things out in my various philosophical investigations. I distilled that to a system of 24 ways that I figure things out. Actually, there seem to be two sets of 24 ways, one more formal and one more personal.

My typical approach is to keep extending my understanding of conceptual frameworks by sorting through real life experiences. For example, I had a model of our basic emotional responses and then I wondered, How could I describe the thousands of moods that we experience? I selected a body of data, namely, poetry, with the idea that a poem is created to capture and evoke a particular mood. Specifically, I studied a collection of 37 short, classic poems from the Tang dynasty, each with four lines of five syllables. Then I considered what feelings and moods a poem evoked and how and why it did that. I realized that the poem was changing perspectives but also manipulating the boundary between self and world which is prominent in my emotional model. I sorted the poems according to the transformation of the boundary and came up with six groups corresponding to reflection, shear, rotation, dilation, squeeze and translation. Then I structured these six transformations - I realized that I could think of them as relating four ways of thinking about a triangle (in terms of path, intersections, angles or oriented area). Recently, I realized that these are Mobius transformations, which are generated by inversions, and I should replace reflection with inversion, which is very similar. With that adjustment, it is the case that these are the transformations which map circles on spheres. In other words, the boundary between self and world is the boundary between the inside and the outside of a circle on a sphere. https://www.math4wisdom.com/wiki/Research/20230311AGeometryOfMoods This example shows the interplay between a language of conceptual frameworks and a body of real life experiences.

Other approaches include introspection, where I slow my mind down and imagine the various pathways available. I have created large art shows, installations which help me overview my language of frameworks and see it in a new way. I have two wikis http://www.ms.lt and http://www.math4wisdom.com with thousands of pages of notes which I keep reorganizing and relating. I do my philosophy in Lithuanian, primarily, which helps me develop my own mental world. I have been studying a lot of abstract math, making use of YouTube videos, online posts and books, Wikipedia articles. I ask questions at Math Stack Exchange and Math Overflow. I participate in the New York Category Theory meet up seminar on algebraic topology. I have found a way (related to Jesus's prayer "Our Father") to engage God, to flatten myself out, ask a question to God beyond me and listen to his response. I have one friend, theoretical physicist Thomas Gajdosik, who I visit in person once a month. He listens for about five hours as I share my progress on theology, philosophy, math, physics and personal growth. With another friend, mathematician John Harland, we talk once a week on Zoom for at least an hour and listen to each other about the progress we are making in physics and math. I lead a small Math 4 Wisdom discussion group where I am trying to nurture a community of investigation. I expand my horizons by living in the periphery, currently rural Lithuania. I organize workshops for independent thinkers at the local prison in Alytus. I learn a lot by presenting my findings in the YouTube videos I create.

How do you currently envision the future of scholarly institutions?

I don't know how our entire world may be changed by the climate crisis, artificial intelligence, digitalization of society, geopolitical shifts, tribalization and globalization, refugee crises, world war, intervention by God or extraterrestrials. But I expect that there will be more education of children, young adults and older adults for the sake of bettering their status, socially and economically. Additionally, I believe there will be more people who will have both the desire and opportunity to seek meaning through continuous learning. There will also be an ever expanding academic caste that is attached to the existing system with its strictures, which allow, encourage and pressure people to stay within boundaries and not consider any moral responsibility they may have beyond them.

My personal choice is to focus on independent thinkers as individuals, working together to foster a shared culture, with a sufficient number of them developing a shared set of beliefs and values, whereby they can get by, no matter where they live in the world and how our world changes. I do not want to change the existing culture but rather organize an alternative, complementary culture, which is able to coexist with the world as it is. The existence of this culture will, I believe, have a positive influence on the world, especially as an example of what is possible.

I think that this culture of the periphery needs to include and support people along a spectrum of peripherality.

For people established within the system, there needs to be an online scientific community which would be supportive of their interests that do not fit within their narrow fields.
For people who don't fit within the system, there needs to be a network which recognizes their value and can help them get temporary, part-time knowledge work by which they can get by.
For people who want to contribute to the scholarship commons, which is to say, shared resources such as Wikipedia, then it would be good if they could receive benefits or perks or rewards.
For people who want to pursue specific projects with specific goals, it would be good if it was easier to get support through crowdfunding.
For leaders of this culture, as I aspire to be, it would be good if there was a pyramid of support, as is possible with Patreon, and to the extent that the leaders provide value to the community as champions, catalysts, advocates and organizers.

I think the key to such a future is a loose network of supporters and developers of this shared culture, perhaps led by those who are successful in their own personal projects. I think it would help if there was a forum for articulating this culture and learning to work together in terms of it.

Are you already founding a new alternative academic institution? If so, please describe your progress so far, e.g. its name, URL, location, do you have cofounders, do you have funding, etc.

I am the founder of "Math 4 Wisdom", which I am developing as the hub of a scientific community to relate the language of wisdom and the language of mathematics. December, 2020, I acquired the domain http://www.math4wisdom.com In June, 2022, I started crowdfunding through Patreon, but I only have one supporter so far. https://www.patreon.com/math4wisdom In August, 2022, I published my first video at my YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@math4wisdom To date I have published 16 videos, I have 60 subscribers, and received more than 2,000 views. I lead a discussion list https://www.freelists.org/list/math4wisdom Six people participate supportively, regularly, including research mathematician John Harland in California, theoretical physicist Thomas Gajdosik in Lithuania, statistician Raimundas Vaitkevičius in Lithuania, math educator and futurist Kirby Urner in Oregon, technical writer and facilitator Jon Brett in New Zealand, and video maker Bill Pahl in Lithuania. They have started to get to know each other. I am also reaching out by participating at the Mathstodon community for mathematicians https://mathstodon.xyz/@AndriusKulikauskas and the Discord servers for the Summer of Math Exposition and the Theories of Everything Podcast.

I am based in Lithuania, in the village Eiciunai. Currently, I have $13,000 in savings. My monthly expenses are about $700. I am able to devote myself completely for at least one year to develop "Math 4 Wisdom". By that time I expect to have published more than 100 videos which would make clear my investigations and also those of our Math 4 Wisdom community. My current plan is to earn my living through the support of Patreon supporters and perhaps related crowdfunding and crowdsourcing projects. When my savings run out, I will also be open to other possibilities, including part-time employment I might gain through my network.

My interests, values, or expertise are well-showcased by a project/article/artwork/etc. Here is a short description of this work:

"Introduction to Math 4 Wisdom" or, if ready, "Welcome to Math 4 Wisdom"

How did you hear about Scholarship Workshop?

I learned about the Workshop through John Baez's post at Mathstodon https://mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosbaez/109814312414463488

Please give any other information that you think is relevant.

I am thinking of applying to speak at the International Category Theory Conference https://sites.uclouvain.be/ct2023/ from July 2 to 8 in Belgium. I don't know whether my talk would be accepted and I don't know if I would be able to fund my trip. But for me it would be meaningful because these are the people who could appreciate the parts of Math 4 Wisdom which relate to category theory, such as the Yoneda Lemma and adjunctions. Perhaps such a trip could also be meaningful for the Let Me Think Scholarship Workshop if at the category theory conference I could share the progress we're making in developing new institutions for scholarship. Upon my return to New York I could share the feedback about such institutions that I get from the conference and I could also help people make contacts. I have long experience as a social networker in organizing my online laboratory, Minciu Sodas. In any event, my priority is to attend the Let Me Think Scholarship Workship and I will defer to the organizers as to whether I should go to the conference.