In New York, people seem to think in numbers. “Meet me on 42 and 5th at 10:30,” “Rent’s just hit $4,500 for a 1 bed,” “Dow’s off 300, bonds yielding 4.5,” “2 sugars, $7.50,” “9/11, 3,000 dead.” Mathematical nominalism is the view that numbers don’t exist outside human thought, but are mere conceptual tools to help us describe reality; a particular mode through which people perceive and think, nothing more. By this logic, thinking in numbers is just a level of abstraction. They are a step back from reality into a fictional quantification of complex clusters of things now simplified into digestible, artificial chunks of value for our own comfort. Perhaps it is only with the help of numbers that New York’s infinite messy sprawl of experience can become legible. 

“When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” they say, so in these last two weeks in New York I, too, have been consumed by numbers. Navigating the grids of streets and avenues, taking the number 2 train, making quick subtractions so I can stretch my last $100 across ten days. I’ve come to realize that, even if fictional, quantification is the most pragmatic problem-solving technique we have. Seeing problems through feelings doesn’t get you anywhere. Seeing problems through a narrative comes with a heteronomous price tag. Our navigation of problems now rests on some unreliable commitment to the external forces of dramatic irony, fate, or foreshadowing. But seeing problems through numbers removes the obstacle of feeling and leaves us with a reliable mathematical puzzle. If I save $30 vaulting the subway for the next week, I can afford a hostel for Saturday or some drinks on Friday, and it seems to really work. Somehow, this fictional abstraction of reality has incredibly reliable results. As I look up at the rows and rows of buildings piercing the sky and back down at the streets where millions of lives weave together in a ceaseless flow of innovation, culture, finance, media, and power. I realise this whole fucking thing would not be possible without stepping back into numbers. 

Robert Moses, the urban planner who shaped 20th-century New York, is as good an example of  ‘pragmatic quantification’ as you can get. Relocating 500,000 people and sorting them into grids, categories, and sets requires abstracting; taking this vibrant mess of confusing things like narratives and experience, and forming a puzzle got him far. It also got the city far, pushing it into being a hyperconnected global capital of finance and innovation. However, his puzzle was not on pen and paper. His mathematical proofs were in asphalt and concrete, in the bridges and roads that divided the neighborhoods of New York and carving up the narratives. I guess quantification is the only viable medium to solve puzzles of that scale since considering the feelings and narratives of mass numbers of people is impossible but the things he abstracted from were real things. Whilst narratives, experiences, and vibes are less pragmatic, they matter, and abstracting from them comes with a cost. 

Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, must’ve justified his profession through ‘pragmatic quantification’ when calculating the treatment of a dying child against margins of profitability. His wealth came from reducing the human condition to a mathematical formula: X lives extended by Y years at Z expense. He did not hear the narratives of the afflicted but rather saw the balance sheets, the profits, the numbers. On the 4th of December at 6:44 AM on West 54th Street, Brian Thompson was shot by two bullets, each inscribed with three words; deny, defend, depose. He died aged 50. 

46 streets up the ‘New York City Hostel’ sits on 96th street. I found myself there after I decided to cancel my stay with a guy I met on coachsurfers.com. I was drawn in by the narrative and pragmatic allure of staying with a (strange) stranger for free. But after my instincts told me to leave, paying $30 for the hostel was a fair price to escape a potentially ugly situation. There was excitement amongst the other hostel guests, as five weeks earlier, this hostel was home to Luigi Mangione the night before he killed Brian Thompson. This topic triggered conversations amongst the guests about the finality of life and unexpected death. Numerical abstraction might be pragmatic, but it leaves a gaping blind spot in reality. When that bullet hit Thompson’s head, his realm of numbers dissolved into fiction. Quantification would not save his life. His spreadsheets, savings accounts, calendars, and time itself, all became meaningless in an instant. He was left only with the raw truth that his experience was ending—perhaps because he had abstracted away the experiences of others, assuming the world functioned in a clean, predictable system of inputs and outputs. Quantification may have allowed for the erection of the twin towers but it would not lessen the visceral experiential horror New York endured when they crumbled into an indiscernible number of shards of suffering and debris. I lay on the foam hostel mat, wondering if this was the very mat Mangione slept in whilst he allowed his mind to be consumed with rage at the world for ignoring narratives in favour of ‘pragmatic quantification.’ His narrative was real and it would not be ignored. He would not be reduced to a number on a spreadsheet. I then thought about numbers and their promise of order in chaos guided me into a gentle sleep. I wonder if Mangione,  as a data engineer himself, also thought about numbers whilst he lay in the New York City hostel the night before he killed Brian Thompson. 

Following the murder, for many, Mangione became a hero. His name, once obscure, now burns like a torch, carried by those who long felt crushed by bureaucratic indifference.  His face is printed on T-shirts across the city. “Deny, defend, depose” is graffitied on the sides of courts and banks. Some say he attained his messianic status by being hot or Italian, but I think it is because he became the ultimate narrative hero. He sacrificed his freedom to champion the narratives of ordinary Americans. And for a moment in New York, the unthinkable felt possible – it became a city where human narrative triumphed over the calculus of profits.

As I get older, I find myself becoming more and more mystified by mathematics. As a child it represented some sort of language of torture, an indecipherable confusion that I had no interest in. Now I’m enamoured by its simplicity. Maybe abstraction is another word for detaching or escaping. But mathematical nominalism is only one side of the picture; mathematical platonism posits that while numbers do not exist as physical objects, they are just as real. There is an abstract realm of numbers, shapes, laws, and forms existing independently of human thought that we gradually discover rather than invent. Platonism is more popular amongst mathematicians, and I can see why. There must be something so beautiful about tumbling into a world of objectivity, getting lost in its complexity, and then reassured by its simplicity.