# I Keep Finding Reasons Why History... *Originally published on Caped Corners, 2025.* --- Some weeks ago, at [Student Senate](https://studentsenate.ku.edu), someone asked me this: 'With all the things you say you’re up to, would taking ***this*** not be too much work?' ***This*** was a newly-established committee, which I was vying for. In response, I heaved a sigh of *acceptance* and offered a cheap rebuttal – that I had dropped some of the roles that previously occupied me hence was able to take up this new role. That response seemed sufficient. It did not, at that time, seem to eviscerate the stacks of experience and motivations I had just shared with the council members that evening. After several minutes of pensive waiting, the thick wooden doors reopened and I was elected. Yet, after settling back at my place that evening, I felt uneasy at the response I offered to that question. Specifically, I felt as though I had played down the importance of the roles I formerly held. Those jobs were a lot of work and, at least while I did them, personally meaningful. I wanted to do them – and did. Before I shut my eyes for the night, I opened my journal and scribbled, “I should have said, ‘There's always time for things you deem important.’” --- It was on this same spirit I, with my friend, booked a trip to Houston, Texas, at the end of January: Rice University was hosting the [American Soccer Insights Summit](https://americansoccerinsights.com) (ASI) and we simply had to be there. A year ago to that date, I was at another conference of its kind – [Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Sports Analytics Conference](https://www.stat.cmu.edu/cmsac/conference/2024/) – where I met [Sarah Rudd](https://www.srcftbl.com/#team), CEO of [SrcFtbl](https://www.srcftbl.com) *(pronounced ‘Source Football’) *& Arsenal's former head of football data. You can imagine the buzz around her and the other professionals who were visiting. Yet, at the cusp of the night, during at her escape from the event venue, I managed to steal a word. *Now, I was in my first semester of college at that time. You – reader – likely know the lore and chaos that had, until then, accompanied my journey. But in that space in Pittsburg, surrounded by all those enthusiasts, hopefuls, and professionals, I was just Joel. I loved it.* I introduced myself to Sarah as a scout interested in analytics.* *Immediately after the courtesies, I barreled into queries about her work, and more pertinently, the future of the analytics industry. *At that point in the conference, we had heard about many technical projects and listened to broad advice about what to do to stand out – but I wasn't interested in any of these to be honest.* I wanted to get a broader scope of possibilities in the industry. To get a kiss of the larger targets and direction of sports or soccer analytics. To know what might be useful to work on. What kinds of problems clubs were needing solved. And how, if at all, to position myself to make an impact here. Sarah obliged and discussed some challenges (hence opportunities) they were exploring. One year later, some of the mentioned items were tackled by presenters at ASI, which Sarah herself co-organized. --- That evening, while Sarah spoke, I took particular note of the implicit importance in the history of innovation – more specifically how an understanding of what had been done, the outcomes, and what is being done was necessary to thinking precisely about the future. This thread has been one gripe I’d carried about the pedagogy of sciences and *Nigeria*, the entity, which I was subjected to. In either case, whenever I share an observation with friends or experts who have immersed themselves in their respective histories, they are quick to connect and reveal now-obvious canonical consequences about how similar situations played out before. - In engineering, we learn that the generation after generation of micro-processors were optimized for *integration*: Smaller, Pliable, Faster. *Roughly speaking, you know don’t need a magician to tell you what comes next. Should you decide to build tomorrow’s chips, the background tells you what specifications it should have.* - In Nigerian politics, **[archivi.ng](https://archivi.ng)** hosts and releases *flashback* newspaper front-pages that, often ironically, echo whatever problems and challenges we face today. - In ***philosophy of mathematics***, we learn how advancements in mathematics upended and often led to the re-assessment of long-standing pockets of philosophical *truth*.Yet in the impressions of education I have had till this point, this **historicity** was secondary or, worse, entirely discarded. While learning The Calculus for the first time, I was never intimated how or why society needed it – and the exact circumstance during which Leibniz and Newton developed it. I knew nothing of the [controversy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz–Newton_calculus_controversy) around its invention. I only recently discovered that in October 1965, Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, was accused of seizing the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation studio in Ibadan at gun-point. He allegedly replaced a taped broadcast of the Western Region's Premier with his own message, challenging the election results*.* *One recant of the [story](https://thenewsnigeria.com.ng/2020/10/15/flashback-55-years-ago-wole-soyinkas-ibadan-radio-station-invasion-and-why-court-set-him-free/). You might also find it interesting to see how Soyinka discusses this case in subsequent interviews.* More personally, I never learnt about the nature love in mine: How my grandparents met? Where? The exact circumstance that led them to each other and, ultimately, gave air the very person writing these words. --- There's no doubt that history is important. It carries with it the all-important *whys* and *hows* and *chronology*. For a given game, history teaches why it was developed, how it’s been played, why it’s not been played a different way, and the exact circumstance that led us to whatever iteration I observe today. Broadly, studying history necessarily means learning how to interpret or contribute to a craft. So why do most pedagogies – especially of the sciences – not include some *history*? These days, I am finding it particularly difficult to imbibe engineering concepts without some complimentary historical epistemology (how knowledge evolves), which often leads me to other pools of seemingly fundamental science that I didn’t already know. *Crazily, the professors occasionally bring up these topics – then ask us to ignore it as ‘engineers don’t need to know…’* --- *I one-shotted this essay several weeks ago and forgot about it. Revisiting because I am trying to diagnose another issue I am facing with ‘university’, ‘education’, or whatever this is meant to be. Reply to this email if you have any comments or thoughts!* --- See also: [[Nigerian Students]], [[A Catharsis]], [[Good Mathematics]], [[Transitions]]