It’s Greek to me
Wednesday, March 1st, 2006Last night I spent the evening reading Paul Graham essays (and thus wanting to learn Lisp 
). Also read Eric Raymond’s How to Become a Hacker. Interestingly enough, the brief discussions of math therein were like drops of water to a parched tongue, making me salivate for more. The last math I really did was AP Calculus back five years ago in high school, and all I can remember of that is the word “integral,” the word “derivative,” and something about dy over dx (I think). So I pulled out my copy of Euclid’s The Elements (the three-volume Dover set) and started reading through the propositions. (Disclaimer: despite the following sentence, I still think I’m a normal, healthy human being.) It was fun. Today I stopped in at the library after lunch and picked up a neat book called The Nature and Power of Mathematics. I’ve only read 13 pages of it so far, but the two forces at work are readily apparent: the first is a strong desire to re-learn what I’ve forgotten and then to push the boundaries of my knowledge and burst out into new, glorious horizons of mathematical beauty; the second is a befuddled cloud that sits on my head and reminds me just how little I know about math nowadays, and that’s why half of what I read is hard to understand. But obstacles are meant to be overcome, so I’ll press on until I can comprehend multivariable calculus and all that. To infinity (wait, don’t limits have something to do with infinity? It’s starting to come back…) and beyond!
Technorati Tags: math, Paul Graham, Euclid
