My peace with Mathematica

After digressing heavily into T.R territory (it was fun while it lasted), I believe it is time to put this train back on track.

So without prattling on,

I write this piece, after a renewed interest in Mathematics has gripped me over the past month or so.

The spark came from an urge to face my arthimophobia. Yes. Mathematics was my very own personal immovable object that became too tall a hurdle subsequently. (Marilyn Manson’s Personal Jesus is for some reason running in the back of my mind at the moment).

I used to go pale and freeze up during my term and semester exams. Sometimes, after having practiced this bloody science for up to 5 hours in a stretch. It just blotted out: the sun, all the joy in my life, my happy place etcetera and blanked my mind out at the most inopportune of times.

I have failed maths in the past and in turn maths had failed me many more times than I prefer to recall, though mathematics wasn’t always the demon that stands before me today.

I used to love the thrill of getting the numbers right.

It was an adventure which always had a reward at the end of the journey or at the end of the book (depending on your level of perseverance). An apple from the mysterious tree of knowledge, if you will. If the problem didn’t have an answer, they wouldn’t put it in an educational book right?

All was well and good until sometime in my past, the theory became too abstract for me to visualise. My good readers, as many of you might already realise, if we can’t visualise a concept; if it isn’t accessible enough to us, we misunderstand it.

Worse yet, as it was in my case, we fear it.

All the definitions, the axioms and theorems turned into fuzzy little balls of strung up symbology that frankly made me giddy.

Yes I was dumb in this department, but more than anything, it was the visualizing part that got the best of me.

You see - Physics, Chemistry and Biology have nothing on Maths when it comes to complexity in theory. For crying out loud, those branches of science had pictures that I could associate with (Yes, even chemistry with its formulae represented as diagrams).

But not math. No, sir, the elitists that came up with this misunderstood behemoth will not make it appeal to the masses back then. Or at the very least they didn’t try reaching out to me.

The average math genius I came across would come up with the answer just as the teacher would finish announcing the problem. He / She felt no need to explain their rather rude intrusions to the teacher’s discourse. Of course not, they were quite high from basically flashing the middle finger to the rest of us masses sitting in the same room.

Now having grown up into a pesky young man with enough balls to go face to face with any elitist jerk, I actually quite politely approached some of the self proclaimed math prodigies in my social circle.

It was time to take the devil by its horns and here are some of the results of my soliciting. Mind you I was being deadly serious with my questions:

Q from Me: Give me an example in real life of applying integration and/or differentiation to solve some of our daily problems?

Answer from a certain female who topped her class back in Uni : Err, show me a problem from the text book and I’ll solve it for you.

Discouraging.

Q from Me: Can you put ‘differential equation’ in a sentence for me?

A from a distant friend: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_equation

Well, it was at least an effort to point me in the right direction.

Q from Me: Why pure mathematics?

A from an enlightened soul, obviously:

“Consider a pile of garbage in the back of your closet that the previous tenants probably left behind in your current rental property. Now while rummaging through it, you find a number locked box with only two number tumblers to play with (Note to self: He was obviously a condescending SoB).

It would get you excited enough to try all the combinations until you found that stash of porn / weed / 100$ bills etc hiding behind the locked box. It is a similar feeling we get from solving math problems hoping it will lead to something beautiful, something thrilling or something that would make you bloody rich.”

Wow, good point.

So I started from where I was pointed to. Wikipedia. In particular from this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics

I have begun at the very beginning. Relearning numbers. Getting my (now relatively advanced) mind around some of the founding concepts of maths and I must say it was far far more interesting than proof-reading this very boring blogpost of mine.

Now, I just might understand Quantum physics, Chaos and String theories after all.

As I age, I find it easier to revisit some of my past, not only to relive it but to confront it once more from a higher plane of understanding.

TL : DR version:

Face your fears, read about Maths.