
Pi is boring, dull, totally overrated. 37 is fascinating, amazing. Tweets really is equal to google squared, but we never tell our kids that. Because the teachers don't know it either. They do know little ditties about "the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the diddle-dee-diddle-dee-quack", which is obviously not true. One kid knows it's rubbish because he drew a triangle on his brother's face once and had a look, so he just sits there sneering while the teacher quacks and oinks and passes judgement.Every day, we feel constrained by the allowed length of a tweet - this is profoundly interesting, although you do not know it yet. Another thing you don't know is how many great ideas are really simple: like Alan Turing's concept of computable numbers. Where does 37 come from, why is it a star in this book? It is what you get when Infinity collides with Zero. Any 8 year old with some dice or ping pong balls could see this if we showed them how. But no. Instead every child in the world is taught the Fibonacci Series: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8,... and the formula to generate it. And then we stop. God forbid we should explain the colossal implications of it for their adult life, or how it leads us straight into seeing for ourselves how chaos can erupt from simplicity. Numbers can be dull, intriguing, overrated, beautiful. Numbers can be infinite but still dull, finite but fascinating. Most school books tell a story that is clear and neat, dull and pointless. Often we are told something in popular books about mathematics or science that is supposedly amazing, but is actually just shiny.To create, we must first destroy, so we bring down pi in the first chapter. Then we smash some other stuff too.
Page Count:
86
Publication Date:
2016-02-17
No comments yet. Be the first to share your thoughts!