During the last two weeks I have read a 400-page biography of the Indian mathematician Ramanujan, a 150-page memoir by (and tribute to) the British mathematician G. H. Hardy, and five chapters — just over 100 pages — of The Development of Mathematics by E. T. Bell, so it’s safe to safe that I’ve been thinking a lot about math and my relationship to it.
“Relationship” strikes me as a particularly appropriate word to use in my case. I know many people who dislike math or fear math. It’s true that some people are enchanted by math or set out to conquer math. Others battle math their whole lives and always feel that they’re on the losing side. And in the last month I have attended some academic ceremonies that included SecondBorn, so I’ve been exposed to some very young people for whom accomplishment in mathematics is just one of many notches on their belt (or feather in their cap, or flowers in their bouquet — the metaphors are endless).
My own relationship with math has been on-again, off-again, almost in the “Ross and Rachel” sense, where when one of us was in pursuit the other was running away.
In the first remembered interaction with math in the third or fourth grade, it was not that I didn’t understand what to do, but that nobody could read what I wrote. My letters and numbers were so sloppy that they were illegible, and my parents (it may have been one or the other, but I shall give the credit to both) insisted that I recopy (and recopy) my day’s homework until it met and surpassed their standard of legibility. I resented this at the time, but now I can look back at my handwriting and agree that it was the right thing for them to do. At best, my penmanship could have been termed “effusive” or “enthusiastic.” It certainly wasn’t clear, and my teachers were probably grateful for my parents’ insistence that practice would, someday, make perfect. (Mrs. DeRing? Miss Rood? What say you? And my apologies to Mrs. Anderson, who probably saw only the “before” examples.)
To illustrate how bad it was, I did a Google search for “sloppy childish homework.” I probably still have samples of my own math homework from the third and fourth grades, but this is not the night I’m going to search the house and locate the evidence. (Just because I still have everything doesn’t mean that I know exactly where it is.) Maybe later.
Not mine… but similar.
The next time I remember doing anything related to math was in the seventh grade. Mrs. Steinhauer seemed to think that I was bored, so she gave me extra work to do on magic squares. Perhaps this was just to keep me from distracting everyone else, but I enjoyed it.
Eighth grade was when my relationship with math started to get rocky. I really didn’t get this whole “negative number” thing. And there was a time in there when I got different results every time I did a math problem. I’m not sure that I can blame early teenage hormones, but I had no idea what was going on in math that year. Finally I just decided to keep doing the math problems until I got the same result twice and I’d go with that. Mr. Miller must have been incredibly tolerant of the young adolescent mind. The one thing I do remember about our middle school math books is that that they were filled with brightly colored cartoons and corny jokes to get our attention. I suppose it worked because I do remember it, but perhaps it would have been a good idea to make more of the cartoons directly related to the math we were trying to learn.
By ninth grade I was taking math for granted, reading thick novels in algebra class. I understood how to do the work (thanks, B., for teaching it to me on the bus ride home) but I didn’t find it particularly exciting or interesting.
Geometry, however, opened up a whole new world for me in tenth grade. Suddenly everything made sense. Everything meant something. And I liked doing it! Proofs? Constructions? Bring it on!
The next year I was back to algebra in the form of Algebra II, and senior year brought Advanced Math and — thanks to the gods — a semester of Computer Math class, where everything was interesting and made sense again. I converted Microsoft Basic programs to Apple Basic so they would run on the //e. I wrote my own programs. And I happily re-wrote my own programs.
Then came college, and the choice between math and English about which I’ve already written. I went with the English major in creative writing, and took a calculus class to fulfill my math requirement. I could have done this by repeating a level of math I’d already taken, but this simply didn’t occur to me. I had the sense I was supposed to go forward, and forward I went — into familiarity, then confusion. I liked calculating the lengths of the shadows of flagpoles and the number of hamsters in the nth generation, but somewhere along the line I realized that I didn’t quite understand exactly what I was doing. What was this e value, anyway? I wanted to get to know this math thing better, and really understand it. But the more I chased it, the more it slipped away from me. I went backwards in the textbook while the lecturer went forwards, and I wound up in a terrible tangle. By the time I finally went to the teacher, it was too late. She was very apologetic, but I was about ten points short of the grade she thought I deserved and there was nothing either of us could do. (Message to the college kids: visit your instructor at your first opportunity, not your last.)
Then — except for a brief flirtation with computer science, which wasn’t exactly mathematics — math and I were done. Whether we broke up or we drifted apart is hard to say.
I did remember a bit about math. At an editorial job with an engineering society, I could catch typographical errors in some high-level equations. This really impressed the authors, who had doctoral degrees in physics or engineering, but really I just knew that the equations had to be balanced. If they wanted to think that I understood thermodynamics, that was their business. But my memories of math helped me get through some tricky editorial situations.
It was more than a dozen years later when I reconnected with my ex mathematics, or perhaps I should say my x. We forgave each other quickly and got along surprisingly well as I reviewed and re-learned algebra and trigonometry. I even got a good start at another attempt at calculus right up until my personal life fell completely apart; my calculus grade was one of the sad casualties as I managed to sort out almost everything else.
In the last ten years I have flirted with data analysis, but only superficially. But I have also had the opportunity to discuss math education with a friend of mine who happens to be a mathematician. Mathematical topics are never far from his mind, and he’s always been ready to listen to my earnest thoughts — however simplistic or ill-informed — on the subject. So now I’ve been doing more reading about the history of it all, and thinking back to the kind of math I most enjoyed — geometry.
Now, I’m not considering a new career as a geometer (even if that were still a thing). But I am starting to wonder what it would be like to have some fun on the side with this old high school flame. We’ll take it one step at a time and see what we can construct.
Chocolate Sheep 