Professor June Huh’s Commencement Address

At Seoul National University’s 76th Summer Commencement Ceremony for the 2022 Academic Year

created: 2022.08.30. 01:55 · modified: 2022.09.15. 13:13 ·  · license

This post was automatically translated and has not yet been reviewed by me. Please read with discretion.

Hello. I’m June Huh, a mathematician who graduated in the summer of 2007.

If we assume we live healthy lives for 80 years, that gives us about 30,000 days—a number rather too large for our intuition to grasp. I’ve lived through roughly half of mine, and most of you have lived through about a third of yours. Have you ever counted how many of those days you remember? Of the 30,000 days we spend breathing in and out without pause, only a tiny fraction will stay with us for long.

Those days loosely connect three complete strangers: the person I was long ago, the person I am here and now, and the person I will be far in the future. I think today’s commencement, when you bring one chapter to a close and begin another, may be one of those days. I’m very glad to share it with you.

One of the risks you take by attending a commencement ceremony, I think, is the commencement address. There’s a chance you’ll end up listening to the artfully disguised self-congratulation of someone whose luck, determination, and temperament happened to align perfectly and bring them great success. I didn’t come to this ceremony 15 years ago, perhaps because I was afraid, or because I was ashamed of how little I had made of my university years. But you have braved that risk to come here and be celebrated for something worth celebrating.

What should one say in a commencement address? Perhaps it’s worth imagining what you would say to yourself a dozen or so years from now, or what you would like to hear from that future self today. Think about it. There are no obvious words.

The expectations and disappointments, kindnesses and absurdities, good fortune and bad, and the frighteningly repetitive details of daily life over the past few thousand days—or the next few thousand—would be difficult both to recount and to hear. Nor would they serve the purpose of offering encouragement and congratulations. Once put into concrete words, our feelings can seem inappropriate or inadequate.

Even dressed up in the best possible account, my university years were a succession of wrong turns. Surrounded by so many friends who were smart, healthy, and hardworking, I wondered what someone like me was supposed to do with his life. The words of one of my professors, who told me to get some rest and come back, still seem to stare at me from my increasingly sparse transcript.

I imagine that, however different the degree or direction of your experiences, those of you listening have gone through something essentially similar over the past few years. And now you face a greater challenge: the daily repetition of a life that is uncertain and unclear, with an end that exists but is hard to see. It may be harder than you expect, or just as hard as you expect.

Now you are adults in earnest. Don’t fear failure; take on challenges. Reject the comfortable, safe path. Don’t compromise; pursue your true dreams. This is all good advice, and especially useful from society’s point of view, but you have already considered that things may look different from an individual’s point of view. By a few blunt measures of zero-sum, relative evaluation, only some will be counted as exceptionally successful.

Fickle chance, other people worn down by life, and, more than anyone, you yourself may be harsh to you. So steel yourselves. Each day from today onward will answer the old question: How will I live when I grow up?

I hope you won’t be distracted by an endless succession of preparations—for a job, marriage, child-rearing, education, promotion, retirement, old age, and finally death in a respectable private hospital room somewhere. I hope you won’t grow accustomed to the temptations of rudeness, hatred, competition, division, comparison, idleness, and futility. May you withstand all the violence of meaning and meaninglessness and experience each day fully, so that at the end you can greet, without regret, the stranger who has been waiting for you all this time: your future self.

I wondered what I should say to the person I was long ago if he had come to his commencement ceremony, but I couldn’t settle on an answer. I feel sorry for him when I think of the days he will experience, and I envy him so deeply it makes my heart ache. I wonder what words of congratulations you have imagined giving yourselves.

Mathematics permits any definition that is consistent. A large part of a mathematician’s work is choosing which definitions to use, and their value lies in which of the possible ways of using language brings forth the most beautiful structure. Being here with special people in a special place on a special day, I feel so elated that every attempt seems precious. I wonder if we could embrace others as our own far-future selves, whom we do not yet remember, and ourselves as others who, if only for a little while, are fully here with us now.

Graduates, congratulations on completing what you have worked toward for so long, and congratulations on today’s new beginning. I hope you will be kind to one another and to yourselves, and carry that kindness forward to the people we will be in the distant future. I’m cheering you on. Congratulations, and thank you.

I’ve marked the parts I liked in bold at my own discretion.