These next few posts have been scheduled. So you can pause Peter Gabriel and bring your boomboxes home. Or not. I mean it is a good song.
I've always felt about math the same way I felt about Santa as a kid. As in, I believe it's a real thing. I believe what people tell me about it. But the hows and whys just seem mysterious and magical and a little out of reach. And somewhere around age eight is when they both stopped making sense. Honestly the only way I manage to help little ninos along in terms of math without damaging their internal calculators is by taking a "We are learning together! We are having fun!!" approach. Or, you know, forcing teachers or my more mathematically-inclined comrades to give me a crash course in things like fractions. (Wth is with the lattice method, by the way? Who thinks up these weird new ways to torture children with figures?) There was that one time I accidentally taught a kid algebra, though. That was a pretty good time.
So I'm officially finished [have been finished for weeks but am terrible at blogging] with my first math class in, um... since my sophomore year of high school. And I have to let you in on something, friends: I am not "bad" at math. At what point do we start telling ourselves we're "bad" at something and then dismiss it? I mean obviously you can't be good at everything. But George Washington Carver wasn't good at inventing the light bulb at first. And imagine where we would be today if George Washington Carver didn't invent the light bulb. I mean, really you guys, imagine if George Washington Carver just gave up after his first failed attempt at inventing the light bulb.
Sometime around the middle of the semester I picked up this book because of its title, "The Joy of X." Steven Strogatz, you tricked me. But I'm not mad at you anymore, because after I realized it was about math and went EUGH and threw it back down, I felt kind of bad. Not so much for throwing the book, but because making loud strangled noises of primal revulsion very loudly and throwing things is rude to other library patrons and just plain poor manners. And my mother raised me. So I picked it back up and thought "Well, maybe. It is brightly colored. Plus the cute librarian will think I'm smart."
And then I actually read it (take THAT, skeptical look on cute librarian's usually winsome face) and it was so. good. Even though Steven Strogatz explicitly promised me that by the time I finished his book I would be a calculus expert* (I believe calculus experts are referred to as "calculators" in the biz) and I am not, in fact, now a calculus expert (or a calculator, if you will) which means that Steven Strogatz is a liar and a fraud**, I am still recommending this book to you. Because of forgiveness.
"...we might notice a potential downside to numbers. Sure, they are great timesavers, but at a serious cost in abstraction. Six is more ethereal than six fish, precisely because it's more general. It applies to six of anything: six plates, six penguins, six utterances of the word "fish." It's the ineffable thing they all have in common.
Viewed in this light, numbers start to seem a bit mysterious. They apparently exist in some sort of Platonic realm, a level above reality. In that respect they are more like other lofty concepts (e.g., truth and justice), and less like the ordinary objects of daily life. Their philosophical status becomes even murkier upon further reflection. Where exactly do numbers come from? Did humanity invent them? Or discover them?
An additional subtlety is that numbers (and all mathematical ideas, for that matter) have lives of their own. We can't control them. Even though they exist in our minds, once we decide what we mean by them we have no say in how they behave. They obey certain laws and have certain properties, personalities, and ways of combining with one another, and there's nothing we can do about it except watch and try to understand. In that sense they are eerily reminiscent of atoms and stars, the things of this world, which are likewise subject laws beyond our control... except that those things exist outside our heads.
This dual aspect of numbers - as part heaven, part earth - is perhaps their most paradoxical feature, and the feature that makes them so useful. It is what the physicist Eugene Wigner had in mind when he wrote of 'the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.'"
STEVEN STROGATZ
*Steven Strogatz does not promise this. At all.
*Untrue. Steven Strogatz is a gentleman and a scholar.
And he fights crime in his spare time, I am pretty sure.
