By Matthew McDonald
The Holy Father is thought to be the first math major to become pope – and math aficionados say it’s about time.
FIND THE POPE'S BIOGRAPHY HERE
“The first American pope” is not the first thing that occurred to mathematician Martin Nowak when the former Cardinal Robert Prevost appeared on the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square last month.
Instead, he fixed on the Pope’s new name.
“Leo” has three letters. And his regnal number — XIV, or 14 — comes after that. Put them together and what do you get?
3 … 1 … 4 — 3.14.
“So it’s Pope Pi. That thought came to my mind immediately — we can think of him as Pope Pi,” Nowak, a professor of mathematics and biology at Harvard University and a Catholic, told the Register.
Pi — the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter — is an infinite number, and one of many concepts that Bob Prevost, as he was known before entering religious life, likely studied as a math major at Villanova University from 1973 to 1977.
A non-exhaustive search by the Register found that before Leo XIV was elected May 8, there were zero popes who studied math as a primary emphasis before becoming bishop of Rome, a see historically dominated by students of theology, philosophy and canon law. (Pope Leo is also a canon lawyer, but he studied it several years after college.)
That means that Catholic mathematicians are having a moment.
“I’m not surprised that the Pope has studied mathematics, because I’m convinced that God is a mathematician,” said Nowak, author of the books Beyond (2024) and Within (2025) whose doctoral dissertation was titled “Stochastic Strategies in the Prisoner’s Dilemma.”
“It makes a lot of sense that his pastor on Earth is a student of mathematics,” he said.
Prevost attended an Augustinian seminary high school as a teenager. When he went to Villanova, an Augustinian university, he knew he wanted to join the Augustinians after college and eventually become a priest, which he did.
So why did he major in math?
For mathematicians, the better question is: Why wouldn’t he have?
“Often, the kind of person who wants to become a priest is the kind of person who sees order and beauty and truth and the transcendentals of nature in the world, and the people who see these things are naturally attracted to mathematics,” said Brad Jolly, who majored in math at the University of Michigan and has worked for 29 years in the electronic test and measurement industry, helping medical device manufacturers.
Jolly, of Longmont, Colorado, a convert to Catholicism, doesn’t just dabble in math. He collects math textbooks from all over the world — about 500 — and he has invented about a dozen math puzzles. He also developed math activities for Catholic-school students in Uganda, as Catholic News Agency described in April 2022. He plans to present his Catholic-inspired approach to teaching math, called “Uncommon Cor” (a play on the Latin word for “heart” and an educational standards system called “Common Core”), at the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education national conferencein Lincoln, Nebraska, in July.
In a telephone interview with the Register, Jolly acknowledged that many people don’t see an obvious connection between math and the priesthood, and he called that situation “heartbreaking.”
For instance, he sees a close connection between math and systematic theology, which seeks to bring order and coherence to Christian doctrines.
“You move from the concrete to the abstract,” Jolly explained. “And math is where kids really first get that opportunity.”
An example, Jolly said, is the time a scribe asked Jesus which of the 613 commandments in the Hebrew Scriptures was the most important, and Jesus reduced them to two — love God “with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength” and love your neighbor “as yourself” (Mark 12:28-34).
That’s the kind of reasoning the Church can benefit from, he said.
“Having a Pope with a mathematical background at a time like today is just such a blessing. My hope is that he would take this ability to think about things in an abstract way that addresses many problems at once and offer ways to solve problems that give us principles,” Jolly said. “That’s what Jesus did.”
Why Math Was Possible
Timing was everything when it came to the college major of the future Pope. Had he gone to college a few years before he did, in the mid-1970s, math wouldn’t have been an option for him.
Before the graduating class of 1972, candidates for the priesthood in the Order of St. Augustine in the Villanova Province were required to major in philosophy. That year, the order allowed students to major in something else as long as they took at least 30 credits of philosophy, according to Augustinian Father Michael Di Gregorio, author of the article, “The Story of the Augustinians in North America, 1850-1920,” who corresponded with the Register by email.
Prevost was a candidate for the Chicago Province. Having to major in philosophy was a common situation for men who wanted to become a priest in a religious order before the post-Vatican II changes.
Benedictine Brother Norman Hipps teaches math at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, which he led as president from 2010 to 2019. He was required to concentrate in philosophy as an undergraduate while a candidate for the priesthood during the 1960s, which he did during his first two years in college. Only after he announced that he didn’t intend to become a priest was he allowed to switch his major to math. He eventually got a Ph.D. in math (doctoral dissertation title: “Elementary Thom/Boardman Theory for Characteristic P Greater Than Zero”).
Brother Norman sees math as excellent training for a priest, even if he didn’t become one.
“Math is an interesting field to study, whether it’s pure or applied. It has both that rigor that’s required — proving something that is to be proved, that other people will be convinced of your argument — but also requires a fair amount of intuition,” Brother Norman told the Register by telephone.
“In terms of those kinds of things a priest needs to do, whether it be thinking properly, or being attentive to different ways of looking at a situation, and sometimes being amazed that something that seems to be not true is true when you put the pieces together properly, I think it’s a great field for anyone who wants to be a minister — or to seek God, to put it in monastic terms,” he said.
Eternal Truths
Math isn’t a rarity for candidates for the priesthood now.
About 10% of candidates for the priesthood being ordained during the spring of 2025 majored in math or science, according to a study produced by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The center’s 2019 book Catholic Bishops in the United States found that 9% of bishops reported having a degree in science, technology, engineering or math, disciplines known collectively as STEM — as Pope Francis, who studied chemistry before entering the seminary, did.
For mathematicians, the trend makes sense.
Carlo Lancellotti, professor of mathematics at the College of Staten Island, said math “introduces us to what I would like to call the realm of certainty and necessity,” during a talk at the John Paul II Institute in Washington, D.C., in December 2024.
Math’s rigor, he told the Register this week, lends itself to religious habits and a religious way of thinking. “In one sentence, I would say that math educates us to contemplate eternal and perfect truths, and that to do so it requires a sort of ascetic discipline: One has to patiently work out all the steps of the proof and submit to its necessity,” Lancellotti told the Register by email.
James Franklin, retired professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of New South Wales in Australia, suggested that Pope Leo’s background in math may make him more confident in speaking out about artificial intelligence, as he did just two days after being elected, than other clerics might.
Franklin also said he sees certain advantages to mathematical training for a Catholic priest.
He pointed out that Galileo touted the certainty of mathematics over the uncertainty of law and humanities, “wherein there is neither truth nor falsehood,” in his 1632 book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.
“The basic idea is that study of mathematics attunes you to a certain kind of eternal realities. With mathematical proof, you understand not only that Pythagoras’ theorem (say) is true but why it must be true, in all possible worlds. That gives you an anchor, a firm intellectual position from which you can be skeptical about the ebb and flow of opinion in the humanities, politics etc.,” Franklin told the Register by email.
“Especially in these postmodernist days, an education restricted to the humanities, law, politics etc. can leave you with the historicist view that all ‘truths’ are up for grabs and can change with time. Someone with a mathematics degree won’t be tempted to believe that. Which should leave them more confident of being able to reach permanent truths in spiritual and ethical topics, which is where you need to start to be a confident priest,” Franklin said.
Jolly highlighted St. John Paul II’s 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio (“Faith and Reason”), which the Pope said “are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.”
The importance of faith is obvious for believers, Jolly noted.
“But sometimes some people can neglect the reason part. And I think math helps us develop that,” Jolly said.
“And I think it’s absolutely wonderful that we have a mathematician Pope.”
SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER HERE
This article was originally published by NCRegister.
