ORLANDO, Fla. – For Dr. Sylvester James Gates Jr., mathematics is magic.
The 74-year-old theoretical physicist had always loved math – it ran in the family, after all. His father and grandfather shared the same love for math.
The moment he realized math was more than just a game though came during his first week in Freeman Coney’s 11th grade physics class at Jones High School in Orlando.
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“(Coney) took a board and he tilted it. And then it had a ruler on the front of it. And then he let a ball roll down the board,” Gates explained. “And if you let the ball roll down and time it, what you find is after one second it moves one unit, after two seconds, it has moved four units, after three seconds has moved nine units down the board. In other words, it’s math. It’s a piece of math. What’s going on is that you square the amount of time to figure how far it has moved.”
Gates said up until that point he hadn’t seen the connection between math and reality. Now he realized that math, as he sees it, was the magical language that made physics happen.
“It’s a little bit like Harry Potter and Hogwarts, because you know, at Hogwarts, you learn to say these Latin words, and then something happens around you,” Gates said. “In physics, you learn the mathematics and you learn about the things happening around you, but you also learn about things. How to make things happen that have never happened before.”
Gates took the language of math to create a storied scientific career – a pioneer in the string theory disciplines of supersymmetry and supergravity, a professor of physics, currently at the University of Maryland, author of more than 200 research papers and five books, recipient of the National Medal of Science, featured in numerous videos and documentaries, and two – TurboTax & Verizon – television commercials.
Gates’ journey into science didn’t start in Orlando, though the City Beautiful was certainly a catalyst.
‘Spaceways,’ Jones HS teacher cast a science spell
Born in Tampa in 1950 to Sylvester Gates Sr., who was in the Army, and his wife, Charlie Anglin Gates, followed the Army brat tradition of moving around as a child. When Gates was four, while his father served at Fort Pepperrell in Newfoundland, his mother took him to see a science fiction film, “Spaceways,” the first movie he can remember seeing.
“That evening I’m told, because I don’t remember this, I’m told that evening, my dad came home from work. I told him I want to grow up and become a scientist,” Gates said.
Gates says his 4-year-old mind equated science and rockets with adventure.
It was an equation that kept him going through early school days. When he had trouble reading and writing, his father brought home science-fiction books to pique his interest.
Gates was still reading and watching sci-fi and comic books when he arrived in Mr. Coney’s class at Orlando’s Jones High School in 1968. Gates describes Coney as “off-scale.”
“In my opinion, he was probably the best physics teacher in Orlando,” Gates said.
Coney taught Gates not only how math can explain what happens in the universe he also introduced him to a world of physics concepts, from Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (he would later co-write a book on the effort to prove Einstein’s theory) to quantum mechanics.
Gates believes Coney could have made a lot of money if he’d been allowed the opportunity in the private sector. But Coney’s prospects were still limited because he was Black, he said.
Gates had moved to Orlando after his mother died and his father remarried. Orange County Public Schools was still integrating Black and white students — slowly. Jones was the only historically Black high school still open in Orange County when Gates attended.
As a member of the school chess team, Gates and his teammates were forced to travel in order to play the other high school teams in the district. That’s how he learned how historically Black schools were treated in the district, versus historically white schools.
“They would never come to Jones High to play the matches, so we always had to go to their locations. And I can remember the first time this happened, being shocked at the disparity in what was being invested in my school, Jones High versus these other schools,” Gates said.
Still, “Le Noir Chevalier Ajax,” as the team was nicknamed, went undefeated in 1968, beating every other school it played.
“I understood that even though I had fantastic teachers at Jones High, the cards were stacked against me. The teachers did the best they could,” Gates said.
There were still 11 segregated public schools in the county in 1970, the year after Gates graduated from Jones.
Gates speaks more about this experience in an interview he did with the Orange County Library System in 2022.
Discovering the magical math of supersymmetry
After graduating valedictorian in 1969, Gates went on to MIT. Mentors helped him bridge the gap between high school and college learning, like physicist Dr. Shirley Jackson, who taught for the MIT transition program in the summer of 1969, known as Project Interphase, and much later Professor James Young, who was the first African-American on the physics faculty at MIT.
While working on his doctoral thesis with Young, Gates found his path – he wanted to teach, and he wanted to focus on a new concept that could make string theory viable.
You may have heard of string theory as the “universal theory of everything.” Gates thinks that definition is overhyped. However, string theory tries to explain how the forces of the universe are tied together to create the particles that lead to life, by positing that inside the quarks that make up the building blocks of atoms, there are vibrating strings of energy, and if they vibrate at a certain frequency, they can create those particles.
How do you explain this? Mathematics.
“I like to tell non-scientists mathematics is scientist’s third eye, because it’s the thing that lets us see properties of nature that no one else has ever seen before,” Gates said.
But scientists struggled to make the math for string theory more consistent – until supersymmetry came along.
In the 1970s, scientists realized that at high energies, all the particles that carry forces (like photons) were connected to a particle (like quarks) that built stuff, and those particles were partners – “superpartners.”
“Supersymmetry is actually the final fix to the mathematics of string theory that makes it totally consistent and as a math consideration only, and brings it as close as possible to our universe,” Gates said.
Here’s one example of how that science and math would make life for all of us better.
If string theory can be proven, it might lead to creating advanced materials that are more efficient for generating and storing energy. Doing that would bring down the amount of fuel needed to generate electricity.
Less fuel needed means less fuel burned. It’s better for the environment.
Gates said the math of “supersymmetry” was unlike anything he had seen before.
“Since it was new, it meant that I could know as much about this as anyone else studying it and that we felt like a fair competition. And that’s what drew me into string theory,” Gates said.
Gates wrote MIT’s first thesis on supersymmetry. Later at Caltech in 1984, he co-authored “Superspace, or one thousand and one lessons in supersymmetry,” which was the first comprehensive book on the subject.
In the early 80s, Gates worked in the Caltech research group led by renowned physicists like Nobel Prize winners Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann (who coined the term “quark”), as well as John Schwarz, who is considered one of the founders of mathematically consistent string theory.
He then went to the University of Maryland, and in 1988 became the first African-American to be an endowed professor at a major U.S. research university.
Gates also became a voice for science communication, appearing on PBS programs like NOVA in the 1990s and 2000s. It was his prowess for teaching that led to his appearances in commercials for TurboTax and Verizon.
In 2013, Gates was elected to the National Academies of Sciences, and was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Barack Obama.
Gates is still teaching at UMD and presenting around the world. In the first two months of the year alone, he’s spoken at science institutions in London and events in Abu Dhabi. He was also featured in a documentary series about Black mathematicians.
He’s also speaking out about the importance of the arts and humanities in science.
The bond between imagination and innovation
“Creativity is the ability to form universally recognizable patterns of harmony, symmetry and order synthesized from ignorance and/or chaos,” Gates wrote in his essay, “On the universality of creativity in the liberal arts and in the sciences.”
The piece posits that scientific innovation and technology cannot advance without the exploration and the questions asked in the liberal arts, be they philosophical questions or creative ones.
In recent years, colleges and universities across the country have gutted liberal arts programs as state governments cut budgets, and students have shifted to science and business degrees.
Meanwhile, some states, like Florida, are doing away with programs dealing with ethnic and cultural studies, and women and gender studies, including classes in sociology, cultural anthropology and more, according to Inside Higher Ed.
If the ability to question and think and imagine is crucial to science and innovation, then the shift away from the arts and humanities is dangerous, Gates says.
Gates relates a conversation about artificial intelligence he had with Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, in 2012.
“Eric turned to me and said, ‘In five years, we’re going to have computers that do what you do.’ And I don’t remember how I answered him,” Gates said. “But I do remember what I thought: Not unless they can dream because this goes back to this element of the imagination, which I claim drives human creativity.”
In a 1969 Orlando Sentinel article, Gates, aged 18, said he hoped to one day use “problem-solving computers,” saying, “Computers will never be in control, but they can certainly make life a lot better.”
And while he now may use AI for minor tasks, Gates worries the drive to prioritize making lots of money from technology like AI over fostering imagination may lead to limiting innovation.
“If this is going on, as I perceive it to be, science itself is actually going to be put at risk,” Gates said. “The country ultimately will be put at risk because the innovation that everyone likes to talk about, Elon Musk and (Vivek) Ramaswamy, they also want innovation. That innovation is actually the harnessing of the imagination, and if we as a society are not hospitable to the idea of supporting our young people, maintaining that capacity into adulthood? Then that innovation is going to be lost.”
Gates is trying to shepherd future scientists. Since 2004, he has sponsored two $1,000 math and physics awards for students at Jones High School, one for a female student and one for a male student.
Gates has also been involved in efforts to promote physics education and STEM in schools around the country and hosts the Summer Student Theoretical Physics Research Session at the University of Maryland.
‘Let your children come to blossom’
At home, Gates and his wife, a doctor, celebrate intellectual achievement. When their son or daughter conquered, by themselves, something in math, the couple threw a party.
Now their son is working on his biology Ph.D, looking at the possibility that human neurons might replace computer chips. Their daughter works at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, studying electromagnetic signatures from spinning black holes, “something her dad knows nothing about.”
For Gates, it’s about building on how he was raised.
“My mother was a typical 1950s mother. She didn’t even know how to drive a car. But she painted, she did macramé, she sewed, she fired clay figurines. These are all things that people with imagination do, right?
“My Dad on the other hand, never finished high school, but he went on to become one of the first, among the first, African-Americans to become a sergeant major in the U.S. Army, which is the highest enlisted rank there is,” Gates said.
Gates points back to how his father knew to give him science fiction books to help him learn to read, fostering his passions and allowing him to grow.
“There are negative trends at work in society that ultimately will be extraordinarily costly,” Gates said. “And one has to have some confidence in oneself that you can identify what these are and provide a cocoon that will let your children come to blossom with whatever is inside of them.”