An Ode to Melinda Gates and Listening to One’s “Inner Voice”

I just posted an ode to Bill Gates, noting the similarities I share with him, and particularly his love of games and math. But I equally love Melinda French Gates – who is an incredible badass feminist icon and who knows how to code (I haven’t learned yet and I still need to learn Python, which I fully intend to do).

Melinda French Gates’ book is about life “transitions” and letting go of persons or situations that are no longer right, even if this means a messy divorce. Melinda French Gates discusses in her autobiography how she heard an “inner whisper” – in the sense of Rumi’s inner whisper or maybe Oprah – and it just started gnawing at her to leave Bill Gates and getting progressively louder, and louder, and louder until she could no longer contain or deny it. I myself have also been guided by an “inner voice” during my spiritual awaking and I have not always obeyed it, and that sometimes saved me from giving into impulses that would have shattered my career – but I agree with Melinda French Gates that listening to one’s inner voice or heart can be key to honor ourselves (meaning, humans, but especially women).

My favorite all time book isn’t written by Junot Diaz, but by Paulo Coehlo, a Brazilian author who wrote a book given to me when I lived in Chile and worked after law school representing torture victims by a man who claimed I reminded him of the protagonist “Santiago,” named for the boy/shepherd who travels based on a dream of buried treasure he has in his sleep on a quest – like all heroes must undergo. 

The very process of learning to love math and physics was similar for me – and I learned to listen to my inner voice, which sometimes was really, really loud and would wake me up with dreams insisting that I’d done my diagrams incorrectly and demanding that I wake up RIGHT NOW at midnight and diagram them the “right way.” I’m so glad I listened to these dreams because it led to my new paper (which is still a work in progress, physicists with an interest in game theory and cosmology please contact me), and my scientific work is highly spiritual. 

I’m also guided by nature, where I see representations of the Prisoner’s Dilemma everywhere, like von Neumann saw game theory in biophysics, including in Islamic art, in architecture, and even in bike designs, clearly showing Albert Tucker, the inventor of the Prisoner’s Dilemma identified a shape that already existed in nature itself and therefore is reflected the laws of the universe itself. 

So is John Nash totally wrong? Maybe I “will” have to reconcile my answer with his, because although cooperation exists in nature, like in the tree internet or species that act altruistically like dolphins, non-cooperation also exists in spiteful bacteria that poison others even if it hurts themselves too. And humans can be non-cooperative, even though many people are cooperative. 

To bring this back to Melinda Gates, I do feel, like “her,” I’ve been guided through a transition by my inner self and this true self knows me better than I know myself, at least consciously.  And yes, I have a math “gift” but equally when I started learning math, it was a real struggle, and while parts of it came naturally, I had to work long hours and it wasn’t until I had a conversation with a spiritual teacher who instructed me to “relax” and let my math “come” to me and to have a less adversarial relationship with math and to try to do all my math in a state of relaxation after I meditated or prayed that I really got good.

I believe math is intuitive, and I also believe all humans and animals have math gifts that can be nurtured or cultivated with the right teacher or teachers. Dolphins for example use math to navigate across the ocean, and there’s a great paper by Peter Hore at Oxford about birds navigating based on quantum protein folding, and I love Peter Hore. Both/and.

p.s. I also never had a "leg up" like some persons in that my parents weren't lawyers, and in college, even at Dartmouth, the advisor who I sought advice from never suggested I consider the Rhodes or Marshall, which I would have been eligible for based on my grades. I am glad I represented torture victims instead. But I guess I do have a "leg up" in math/physics given most of my family are in math/STEM/finance. And I had a family connection named Dr. Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

-Cortelyou C. Kenney (6/27/25, 7:58 am PT)

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