The Nature and Growth (and Shrinkage) of Modern Mathematics
I've struggled with math since elementary school. In the 1990's, in my 20's, a late mentor of mine, Dave Mitchell, suggested the book The Nature and Growth of Modern Mathematics by Edna E. Kramer might help me overcome some of that.
It was slow reading for me, and over the course of a few years I made my way through a few chapters. Until early 2001, when I moved to Pune, India for a year. Since I was only going for a year, it wasn't among the few books that I packed up to take there with me.
Then I ended up spending a decade in India before I moved back to the United States. When I did move back to the U.S. I moved to New York City, and didn't have easy access to my large library in storage out in Waldport, Oregon.
With the coronavirus pandemic this year, I figured I'd buy another copy and pick up reading it again. I found a used one easily enough but there's a problem with it. In the 20 years since I last read it, the print has shrunk to minuscule, Holy Cow! unreadable size. (yeah, yeah, I know, it's my aging eyes...)
As for math, I actually did excel at math twice as a boy, in elementary school. But each time the teachers punished me for it and I learned my lesson, never again excel at math.
The first time was in 2nd grade at the Fellowship Farm School in Piscataway, NJ. My best friend, Brian, and I worked ahead in our math workbook, enjoying, having fun. But when our teacher. Mrs. Cooper, found out she punished us. Back then standard punishment was having to stand against the wall in the hallway during class, and then stand against the wall of the lunchroom during lunch, only eating quickly after everyone not being punished had finished. We faced this for a week.
I never again worked ahead of the class in math again.
Then the second time was in 4th grade, in a new school, Waldport Grade School, where I was a new student, having moved there in October 1978. Mrs. Elsie Apt gave us the assignment to write all the numbers from 1 to 10,000. Not all at once, over a few weeks, with some days a set of 100, or 500, or at most 1,000.
Quite an onerous assignment. However, at some point in it I noticed a weird repetition in the digits of sequences of numbers. It didn't take me long to figure out how to exploit that to make the writing of all the numbers go quicker. Especially where the digit 1 (one) repeats in the same position of 10 or more numbers (bearing in mind the maximum repeats is 1,000 but the lined pages only had so many rows...)
Even with other numbers, I could just go down the lines, write 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 over and over till the page was full, then move to the next digit of all the numbers and repeatedly write something like 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, then got to the 3's and so forth and so on...
Of course, my skill at handwriting and related isn't so great that this wasn't obvious from the way I turned in the page.
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| Sample of 210 - 219 |
Mrs. Apt considered this to be cheating. And I had to rewrite a number of pages.
So, despite learning something more valuable about numbers than the teacher probably intended, I got punished for it. Lesson learned, don't excel in math!
On the plus side, that school year my mother was a volunteer whale counter for the Oregon State University Marine Science Center, so I wrote a lot of those number pages, plus other homework, from the top of the Yaquina Head Lighthouse. So that's a hell of a good memory.
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| My Photo of the Yaquina Head Lighthouse from 2016. |
