Quantoid

I learned a new word:

"Quantoid"

My faculty colleague Kevin Kemper said that's what folks in his Ph.D. program at the University of Missouri called fellow students whose dissertations were getting too quantitative. He told me, watch out, I might become one.

Well, not yet.

------------------------------------

I got a promotional brochure in the mail the other day called "The Great Courses: Great Courses Taught by Great Professors." It was nicely produced and had some great photography in it, so I began flipping through the pages. Even though it is clearly advertising copy, these two paragraphs got my attention and made me wonder:

"One of the greatest achievements of the human mind is calculus. It deserves a place in the pantheon of our accomplishments with Shakespeare's plays, Beethoven's symphonies, and Einstein's theory of relativity.

"In fact, most of the differences in the way we experience life now and the way we experienced it the beginning of the 17th century emerged because of technical advances that rely on calculus. Calculus is a beautiful idea exposing the rational workings of the world; it is part of our intellectual heritage."

OK, I want to learn calculus. (not that I get it about either Shakespeare or Beethoven yet.)

--------------------------------------------------------------

I'm looking forward to someday studying about the random way so many things happen.

Just yesterday, I got a note from an 18 year old who was in last semester's algebra class. She sat to my right and up a row or two and came the the first half of most of the classes. She asked me about journalism classes and whether there were any that freshmen could take.

I told her that there was one that was being offered for the first time and that there might be one or two spaces still open. And she signed up. No telling if she'll like it or not or do well or not or fall in love with journalism and go on to do great things or find that she might be happier somewhere else. Time will tell.

But it kinda blows me away to know that in some small way she will be sitting in that classroom being exposed to a whole new world with a great professor partly because some guy in his 50s decided to take an intermediate algebra class that semester at that hour and happened to blog about it and she clicked on this blog and sent me an email to ask about journalism.

And that kind of stuff happens all the time.

---------------------------------------------------

Math 112, college algebra, starts for me tomorrow at 11 a.m. I'll take notes. About the algebra also.