Wondering about Math

Thanks for landing here. This blog is about my new adventure with numbers that will start in earnest in about two and a half weeks.

Math came easy to me as a kid. One of my best teachers ever was Miss Cronin for seventh grade math. She taught me about the magic of logarithms and how to use a slide rule to multiple digits. I thought I wanted to be an aeronautical engineer, partly beasue of a great eppisode of "My Three Sons" with Fred McMurry. And I really liked my slide rule. For the last 15 years I've wanted to write a New Yorker Article about the person in the world who made the last ever slide rule. I also wanted to write a book interviewing famous scientists about their first or favorite slide rules. I probably won't get to that because they are all starting to die.

My eighth grade math teacher wanted to talk about poetry. We learned about inspirational poetry. He wanted to form "the whole human being" rather than teach math. Well, I formed as a human being. My math talent didn't.

I made it through college, for all practical purposes, without ever taking a math or science course. I learned how to work the system, and a ton of other good stuff. But not math. Seth, my 22-year-old son passed me in math when he was in about sixth grade. My wife was a math minor in college. They both know all kinds of things I don't. I'm not competitive, but I still wonder what I'm missing.

Truthfully, I can't think of a time in my life where I've actually needed math. I can't think of a time where any of my friends, other than the engineers, have ever needed math. But, still, for some reason , I'm drawn to it.

I tried to read a book about calculus. Not how to do calculus, just about calculus. Couldn't get through it. I just finished a book about infinity. It was called A Brief History of Infinity. Got through it and loved it.

I was having a drink with a history professor today. He said he was very happy thank you being a math illiterate. I'm happy also. But still curious. What do those squiggles mean? The weird looking E? The elongated S. Do people really make sense of those formulas all over blackboards in movies like "A Beautiful Mind? How do smart guys use math to prove something as nutty as the big bang and actually believe it? Is math, once you actually do it, less fun today because computers do it, or more fun because you can do more stuff and ask more questions?

Right now, I can use a calculator and find square roots and percentages and all that. I can sometimes figure out one x but not if there is a y in the hood. I like the idea of a "pure language" like I imagine mathematics is. But I also wonder whether, the more you get into it, the less pure, or more grey it gets, like so many other things.

I'm 58 and I work with words and pictures. Right now I teach journalism at the University of Arizona. This coming semester I am taking a cut in my course load to pursue a "creative activity." I am choosing to pursue math.

Next, I'll tell you about my trip to Pima Community College to take the math assessment exam.