Mathematical Vomit (I Know. How Charming.)

This is a rant. It will be long. You have been warned.

Think of a number.  Big, small – it doesn’t matter.  Just visualize it.  Its face value, the way it aesthetically looks.  What meaning, if any, it holds for you.

Now think of all the stuff you can do with it.  At the basic level, you can add it to another number, subtract it from another number, have a number subtracted from it, multiply it by a number, divide it by a number, and vice versa.  All of this is basic.

Think of what it can represent.  It can represent the world – the same way it can be multiplied by the world.  Three words.  Three letters.  Just any number you can think of, followed by what it describes.  Such words, you may know, are adjectives.  And this is just the beginning.

Now think of the more abstract things you can do with your number.  If it is the length of a side of a right angled triangle, you can find the values of trigonometric ratios (put simply, if you take two of the three sides, in how many ways can you divide them by each other).  Anything more specific just gets harder to explain, but for now we’ve effectively breached the world which we want to fully unlock: a process which continues to this day, so not to worry if we can’t do it all today.

The thing is, what we were doing till now was math – a word and its representation feared by many, and, sadly, the butt of many jokes.  It’s Greek and Latin to some who don’t realize (or don’t want to realize) how powerful this is.

Do you realize that the colors of the clothes you’re wearing right now are mathematically defined?  Or that the device you’re using right now to read this blog is run on just two numbers – zero and one?  Do you realize your every intake of breath can be reduced to simple numbers, linked by mathematical operations?  What’s more is that every mathematical sentence can be reduced to four simple operations – add, subtract, multiply, and divide.  Operations learned in elementary school.  The phrase, “With great power comes great responsibility” comes to mind, because children are handed tools of great power, because math in itself is powerful.

Math is the power of a nuclear bomb.  It is the energy of the sun, the stars.  It is written in the cataclysmic event that is our mother, the Big Bang.  It is the power of a gamma ray burst set to ravage Earth.  All of which can be reduced to a few numbers and add, subtract, multiply, and divide.

But the way it’s taught – drilled into us from an early age, so much so that inevitably we loathe it as a reflex – is terrifying.  I remember thinking in math class till last year – I will be pressured into completing text book exercises for the rest of my life, when math could be so much more than this.

And it can be – heck, it is – so much more than what is taught till 10^th grade.  Why does it take 11^th grade to realize the beauty of math?

I had realized that kind of math I liked early on – the kind of math that can be translated into the kind of world I see around me.  I like the math that describes the curve of a leaf.  The math that shows the path of volleyball takes when it is served, to the moment it hits the ground.  Math that can be translated.  And math below 11th grade doesn’t really include that.  So I have pinpointed my problem.  As Richard Feynman one said, “At the base of all biology is chemistry, and at the base of all chemistry is physics.” And math is the language of physics, and languages can be translated.

Newton gave us the basic ideas of calculus.  And make no mistake – calculus is, at first glance, a bit terrifying.  But it is a life saver.  Once you start deriving equations with it, you realize that.  And you wonder how one man could come up with it at all.

But Sir Isaac Newton was great in that he took his cues from nature.  He looked at the world around him, and translated it to math.  And the reverse is just as possible.

I started this post by asking you to think of a number.  You might realize by now that, in retrospect, that number holds the key – is the key – to this whole world.  Once the weight of that starts to sink in, you never see the world in quite the same way again.