Bleh. The time I was going to spend writing things for LJ last week turned into work, and the parts that weren't work were a detailed mathy analysis of the ruby strategy in Scepter of Zavandor (because I needed to chew on something decidedly left-brain-y). Which means I failed to mention Wednesday gaming, Sunday brunch and housewarming, or Tuesday dinner and conversation.
Not that I've much to say about any of those. Other than that spending time with a few good people is Good, in almost exactly the way that spending time with lots of people I don't know well isn't.
Via Dr![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rivka, A Mathematician's Lament (warning: PDF), in which I discover that I should have been a mathematician.
To wit: on page 3 or 4, there's a picture of a triangle inside a rectangle, and the question: "how much of the rectangle does the triangle take up?" I looked at it for like five seconds and said "oh, that's easy, you just run a perpendicular line from the top of the triangle to the base, and you've got two rectangles, each half filled with a triangle. So the whole triangle takes up half the area of the whole box." Which, yeah, he goes on to explain that. Then a page later he rails against the fact that kids aren't taught that that process of discovery and problem-solving is math. Instead, math is plugging numbers into "A = 1/2*b*h".
And I got it. I understood, conceptually, why that's the area of a triangle, in a way I never had before. And it is simple and elegant and beautiful, and it took my breath away.
I love things like that. The moment of perfect clarity when something just makes sense, when the bits of a problem come together and fall into place. It's. . . euphoric. It's spellbinding in the same way the Ansel Adams exhibit had me transfixed, with the added bonus of: I did that.
Not that I had any idea that that was what math was really about. Sure, I read Martin Gardner and Douglas Hofstadter, and was on "the math team" in eighth grade, but. . . that was fun. Math was algebra and calculus and diffy-q, problem set after problem set and painstaking attention to every minute detail. Exactly the kind of thing I can't stand.
But, still. A triangle is half the size of the rectangle it fits into. Gorgeous.
Not that I've much to say about any of those. Other than that spending time with a few good people is Good, in almost exactly the way that spending time with lots of people I don't know well isn't.
Via Dr
rivka, A Mathematician's Lament (warning: PDF), in which I discover that I should have been a mathematician.To wit: on page 3 or 4, there's a picture of a triangle inside a rectangle, and the question: "how much of the rectangle does the triangle take up?" I looked at it for like five seconds and said "oh, that's easy, you just run a perpendicular line from the top of the triangle to the base, and you've got two rectangles, each half filled with a triangle. So the whole triangle takes up half the area of the whole box." Which, yeah, he goes on to explain that. Then a page later he rails against the fact that kids aren't taught that that process of discovery and problem-solving is math. Instead, math is plugging numbers into "A = 1/2*b*h".
And I got it. I understood, conceptually, why that's the area of a triangle, in a way I never had before. And it is simple and elegant and beautiful, and it took my breath away.
I love things like that. The moment of perfect clarity when something just makes sense, when the bits of a problem come together and fall into place. It's. . . euphoric. It's spellbinding in the same way the Ansel Adams exhibit had me transfixed, with the added bonus of: I did that.
Not that I had any idea that that was what math was really about. Sure, I read Martin Gardner and Douglas Hofstadter, and was on "the math team" in eighth grade, but. . . that was fun. Math was algebra and calculus and diffy-q, problem set after problem set and painstaking attention to every minute detail. Exactly the kind of thing I can't stand.
But, still. A triangle is half the size of the rectangle it fits into. Gorgeous.