By Chris Coray, The Unmuddled Mathematician
When I became a mathematician I entered an occupational
monastery. Hardly any person ever asked
questions about the content of my profession.
Certainly not at home around the dinner table, as in “What did you do
today, daddy?” That question didn’t get
asked. Being essentially a monk, my wife
is responsible for whatever small skill set I have in the social area. Mathematicians have well and fairly earned
our “true geek” reputations. On the
other hand my wife has never had to own or use a calculator. She just asks her live-in model for answers
and they magically appear. On the down
side she does have to feed me.
But there are also some really positive features in this
line of work. For example, there seem to
be arguments about what is taught in history or political science, or in any
subject where some people see a “Liberal” or “Conservative” bias and insist on
change because they are not happy. Not
mathematics, although some people are unhappy exploring its majesty. It is what it is. And mathematicians do not argue with each
other about mathematics based on opinion.
Something can be proved, it false,
or it is just a conjecture to be pondered.
It is sort of amazing that I have been able to provide for my family and
do so with great joy while just playing a mental game. And a giant benefit I did not see coming was
my chance to stay close and active with my grandchildren who much prefer me to
their parents for the math help they need.
This joy is beyond my capacity to express in words.
Speaking of expression, however, mathematicians are
generally very careful in what they write and say. Often I will laugh out loud at words of
others when no humor was intended. For
example, a guy today (claiming wisdom) said that in spite of the cold, 21
million gallons of water is going over Niagara Falls”. Did he mean 21 million gallons a second?, a
minute?, a year?, a century? He didn’t
say. For this guy, volume and rate must
mean the same thing, a bad notion. Be
careful what you say. Here are a couple
of other suggestions:
Never use the phrase, “XXXXXX may or may not occur”.
That statement is always true
and has no content, as in, “The sun may or may not come up tomorrow”. Yep. What
did you learn from that line?
Don’t use the letters irregardless in speech or
writing. Those letters do not form a
word. People have also recently become
fond of answering a question, “Absolutely!” when “Yes”, without an exclamation
point, is better. Avoid using “like” and
“you know” when all you are doing is filling an empty space in speech with a
meaningless noise without purpose. When
teaching a class and responding to a student question I would hold up fingers
on my hand at each such use by the questioner of those two phrases (mostly
“like”). Watching my hand would often
bring the questioner and question to a complete stop before it was finished,
after which I would encourage another attempt, using the King’s English. The students got better in an astounding
hurry.
And while I have learned how to text so as to stay close to
the precious grandchildren, the ultra-short phonetic mangling of language by
most texters, including acronyms, is painful to me. Add the word “old” to the phrase “true geek”
and you get closer to an accurate description of yours truly. Will I have to add the following objects to
my language? Lol, u,
r, ttyl, and many others not yet
understood. Maybe I can make up some of
my own, as in, fwg, talb, htrtl, dmwb. For the
inexperienced these stand for fishing was good, that’s a lovely boat, how’s the
road to Logan, don't mess with Bob!
C u in 2 w (see you
in two weeks).
No comments:
Post a Comment