Maths in Freedom Struggle, and Love

In his book, The Joy of x, Steven Strogatz points out every field of maths has “one notoriously difficult topic”:

“In algebra, it’s word problems. And in geometry, it’s proofs.”

The reason why proofs are so hard is because it’s usually the first time in their life a student has to prove something. Everything until then was always “because I said so”, be it from the teacher or the parents…

 

With hindsight, with the benefit of life and experience, (some) adults look back at proofs in a different way, as something relevant to areas of life far beyond “triangles, circles, and parallel lines”:

“It trains you to think clearly and logically… What’s important is the axiomatic method, the process of building a rigorous argument, step by step, until a desired conclusion has been established.”

 

Half tongue-in-cheek, he cites the American Declaration of Independence as an example. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident”, and listed the basic things all people are entitled to. And from those, he “derived” the conclusion that the (British) colony of America had the right to govern itself, “as inevitable as a fact of geometry”!

~~

 

In another part of the book, he talks of love. Yes, in a book on maths! Based on the “tumultuous ups and downs” part of love, he takes a slightly contrived scenario where one person’s love increases and decreases in proportion to his partner’s responsiveness. His partner, weirdly though, reacts in the opposite way: she’s increasingly put off the more he loves her, and attracted when he shuns here. Such scenarios are perfectly expressed by differential equations, he jokes, which can then be solved.

 

Problem solved? Not entirely. In our author’s case, it turned out:

“There was an important variable that I’d left out of the equations – her old boyfriend wanted her book.”

To the author, problematic though it was, the situation now reminded him of an un-solve’able problem in maths: the three-body problem! What’s that? Newton ran into this problem soon after he formulated his famous theory of gravity, using which he could explain why planets move in slightly elliptical orbits. But add the moon into the equation, and you have three bodies (sun, earth, and moon):

“He couldn’t solve it, and neither could anyone else.”

Nobody knew it at the time, but the three-body problem “contained the seeds of chaos, rendering its behavior unpredictable in the long run”.

 

Just like love, our author reminds us.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more