Numbers are everywhere
I've always been terrible at maths, didn't do well with it at school and still struggle to this day with anything beyond basic adding and subtracting. However, that doesn't stop me being completely obsessed and fascinated by it all.
For some years now I've become obsessed with physics and the maths that goes with it. I took to reading a lot of pop science books starting of course with Hawking's "A Brief History of Time," which I have now read more than once and still don't quite understand it all, but hey. What I do love though is when something does click and my inferior mind manages to comprehend and understand some element of it, the joy, satisfaction and sheer fascination is incredibly rewarding. What of the greatest book titles ever is Richard Feynman's "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" because learning something new and understanding it is a pleasure and oh so rewarding.
I'm in that position where the subjects that bored me and that I hated in school are now of great interest to me. I wish I had a time machine that would allow me to travel back in time and confront my younger self and tell him to pay better attention in science and maths, and work harder at it. As a favour to his 33 year time travelling future self.
I think what I love most about maths though is that it's everywhere, everything can be broken down into numbers. From angle and shapes to forces of motion, space and time... numbers are everywhere.
Every morning when I arrive a work, I reverse my car into a parking space, and every time I challenge myself to see how close I can get my back bumper to the wall without touching. My car has parking sensors but they'd have me stop with at least a foot of space to go. As soon as I get out of the car I have a quick look to see how close I got this time, and this got me to thinking. At first I would think, I could halve the gap that I currently have, then I would think and then the resulting gap could be halved again. I'd then I'd think more, I'd think; if that gap can be halved again, whatever space remains could be halved again. So in theory I could halve the gap an infinite amount of times without ever touching the wall with the bumper.
That can't be right can it? So I Googled it, and this is what I love.
Turns out that very idea of infinitely halving a value that my inferior brain managed to find in the mundane task of parking my car every morning is a recognised mathematical concept known as "Zeno's Paradox" also known as Infinite Divisibility and is applied in maths, physics and even economics.
Zeno being an Ancient Greek philosopher (thank you Wikipedia) came up with the theory that(forgive my butchered explanation) a person travelling a distance could at the half way point of the journey think to themselves, "I only have half the journey left." Then once they've done 75% of the journey can think to themselves "I have now travelled half of what I had left." They can keep repeating this process of hitting halfway marks of the remaining distance to the point that they would never reach their destination because they are in a constant state of being 50% of the way there.
I know I haven't explained that very well so here's a link to the Wikipedia entry Zeno's Paradoxes
Although at times these philosophical elements of maths and physics can make my brain hurt, I love them and they make me want to question them more and learn more about them, because when I can see something mathematical in the process of parking my car in the morning it makes me view the world in less depressing and stressful light.
I find that when you break things down to the base numbers, everything just seems so much simpler.
For some years now I've become obsessed with physics and the maths that goes with it. I took to reading a lot of pop science books starting of course with Hawking's "A Brief History of Time," which I have now read more than once and still don't quite understand it all, but hey. What I do love though is when something does click and my inferior mind manages to comprehend and understand some element of it, the joy, satisfaction and sheer fascination is incredibly rewarding. What of the greatest book titles ever is Richard Feynman's "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" because learning something new and understanding it is a pleasure and oh so rewarding.
I'm in that position where the subjects that bored me and that I hated in school are now of great interest to me. I wish I had a time machine that would allow me to travel back in time and confront my younger self and tell him to pay better attention in science and maths, and work harder at it. As a favour to his 33 year time travelling future self.
I think what I love most about maths though is that it's everywhere, everything can be broken down into numbers. From angle and shapes to forces of motion, space and time... numbers are everywhere.
Every morning when I arrive a work, I reverse my car into a parking space, and every time I challenge myself to see how close I can get my back bumper to the wall without touching. My car has parking sensors but they'd have me stop with at least a foot of space to go. As soon as I get out of the car I have a quick look to see how close I got this time, and this got me to thinking. At first I would think, I could halve the gap that I currently have, then I would think and then the resulting gap could be halved again. I'd then I'd think more, I'd think; if that gap can be halved again, whatever space remains could be halved again. So in theory I could halve the gap an infinite amount of times without ever touching the wall with the bumper.
That can't be right can it? So I Googled it, and this is what I love.
Turns out that very idea of infinitely halving a value that my inferior brain managed to find in the mundane task of parking my car every morning is a recognised mathematical concept known as "Zeno's Paradox" also known as Infinite Divisibility and is applied in maths, physics and even economics.
Zeno being an Ancient Greek philosopher (thank you Wikipedia) came up with the theory that(forgive my butchered explanation) a person travelling a distance could at the half way point of the journey think to themselves, "I only have half the journey left." Then once they've done 75% of the journey can think to themselves "I have now travelled half of what I had left." They can keep repeating this process of hitting halfway marks of the remaining distance to the point that they would never reach their destination because they are in a constant state of being 50% of the way there.
I know I haven't explained that very well so here's a link to the Wikipedia entry Zeno's Paradoxes
Although at times these philosophical elements of maths and physics can make my brain hurt, I love them and they make me want to question them more and learn more about them, because when I can see something mathematical in the process of parking my car in the morning it makes me view the world in less depressing and stressful light.
I find that when you break things down to the base numbers, everything just seems so much simpler.
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