Maybe My Passion For Math HASN'T Been Ignited At Last

4 days ago I wrote on this blog that perhaps I was finally finding math interesting. But there has not been much progress on that front since then. For quite a while I couldn't find the problem in the Thomas/Finney textbook on calculus and analytic geometry about the speed at which the man's shadow moved and the rate at which its length changed as he walked toward a lamppost. It was such a long while that I actually began to wonder whether I had merely dreamed the problem, and whether calculus would actually be any help which such questions. Then I googled Thomas Finney man lamppost shadow and deduced that the problem was in the 3rd chapter. In the 5th edition it's on page 132.

But I haven't made much progress at all in studying the preceding 131 pages. Whenever I begin to try, it's the sort of torture which the other 5 friends on Friends appear to feel whenever Ross begins to try to tell them about paleontology. I have tended to give up very quickly, and read about something else instead -- the history of India, for example, or paleontology. (I've always been disappointed when the other friends shut Ross down; I feel like I would have found what he had to say about paleontology interesting. Of course, Ross is just a fictional character, and I don't know whether David Schwimmer and all of the writers of Friends all put together actually know anything at all about paleontology or not.)

Clearly, I'm a geek. Just still not much of a math geek. I even felt the torture just now when I looked at a couple of calculators for scientists and attempted to learn what the symbols mean. I know the signs for add, subtract, multiply, divide, X to the power of Y, roots, percent, and... that's about it. (And actually, the % key is only on the calculator for non-scientists.) Presumably, studying those 131 pages would explain many more of the keys for me.

It's just really hard, because I really hate it for some reason.

Is it all my math teachers' fault? No, I really doubt that. The math teachers I had represented a wide variety of personality types. There was no lack of love of the subject among them. And I had a big crush on one of them. Between all of that, and my native aptitude -- I mentioned in the previous post that I had factored 3-digit numbers in my head years before a math teacher told me that it was called factoring, and that those numbers which could only be divided by themselves and 1 were called prime numbers, and that one could refer to 125 as 5 to the 3rd power, and so on. Just to be clear: by the age of 5 or so, I had factored all of the numbers up to and past 1000 in my head, in addition to many much larger numbers such as 1 billion and 15,625 and 6561 -- between all of that, perhaps a passion for math would have been kindled in me back in school if it could at all have been.

Even the factoring in my head has never been fun. It's always been tedious. I didn't start doing it because it was fun, but because I often couldn't stop doing it when my mind my wasn't occupied with something I found interesting, like history or music.

So -- put the Nobel for Physics and the Fields Medal on hold for now. I apologize to my vast numbers of fans if they're disappointed now because I got their hopes up about the math. For now, you'll have to settle for me being a literary genius, profound philosopher and all-around adorable person, as usual, and for me being able to tell when a candidate in the primaries no longer has a chance before most people, although maybe not before Rachel Maddow and Barack Obama, and things like that.

More From Inside My Head

In a previous post I noted that 17,153 is the product of two prime numbers, 17 and 1009. This morning I thought about some numbers near 1009, and calculated that 1007 is 19x53, 1003 is 17x59, 1001 is 7x11x13, 997 and 991 are prime numbers and 989 is 23x43. I calculated all this with the help of a pocket calculator I bought around 1992, which was not at all an advanced calculator even by 1992 standards. I got it because it looks cool and I find it very user-friendly. I divided each 4- or 3-digit number by bigger and bigger primes until I got a dividend which was either a whole number or a fraction smaller than the square root of the 4- or 3-digit number. Then I remembered that lists of prime numbers are readily available, and stopped calculating, and wondered, as I had many times previously, what possible purpose such calculations could serve.

Then I put that pocket calculator away and got out the other of the 2 pocket calculators I own. I don't remember exactly when I bought this one. I think it was closer to the present than to 1992. This other calculator is made by the same manufacturer. [PS, 8 Feb 2018: That manufacturer is Casio, a company for whom I have more respect now, after having heard about their legendary G-Shock watches.] It doesn't look nearly as cool to me. And it does much more. I don't understand what all of its functions are. I know what things like sine, cosine and tangent are, which the newer calculator features and the older one, the one I like better, which has bigger keys and a bigger screen and folds in half with the keyboard on one half and the screen on the other, does not. But I don't know, for example, what the "modes" are which are described above the keyboard of the newer calculator. Not a clue.

As far as I can remember, the only key I have ever used which the newer calculator has and the older one does not, is the X to the power of Y key. And as far as I can remember I only used that one to see whether I understood how it was to be used. I guessed that if you hit X, then the key, then Y, then =, the screen would display X to the power of Y. For example, if you hit 3, then the key, then 4, then =, the screen would display 81. My guess was correct.

So I'm looking at the newer calculator now, and I'm looking at an instrument whose purposes I am largely ignorant of, and I'm wondering how much less mysterious to me the instrument might be if I had not stopped taking math courses as soon as I was allowed to stop, after geometry in the 10th grade. I'm also wondering whether and to what extent fancy -- I'm sure it's not at all fancy to some people. I remember it wasn't the most expensive pocket calculator in the store -- to what extent fancy calculators like this one might have been rendered redundant because smart phones can do everything they do. My phone is not smart. It has a calculator on it, which I used once, but I found it excruciatingly difficult both to find and to use and I don't plan to use it again soon.