Maths. Boo.

 

I have a double-ended geysering hellhound.  Sigh.  I missed both cup of tea with optional singing with Oisin this afternoon and home tower bell practise tonight, feeling that I will remain much more serene, given the circumstances, if the hellhound in question is immediately under my eye at all times.*  I'm Olympic-standard fast with the newspaper for the front end and I still had to do an unplanned floor-mat wash this morning**, and a hellhound that requests to go out in the given state of duress tends to mean NOW and while Peter could probably get the door open fast enough, the ensuing pick-up is not inspiriting*** and I don't entirely trust either hellhound not to set off immediately in quest of the absent hellgoddess, since you don't hang around putting harnesses on before you let the trembling hellhound out. 

            So after a slower-than-usual afternoon hurtle we retired to the sofa.†  I had liked Alex Bellos' ALEX'S ADVENTURES IN NUMBERLAND so much that I decided to look for some other maths-popularisation book, preferably one that would cover a few of the basics.††  One thing that did make me a little testy about NUMBERLAND is that while it genuinely is popular maths for ordinary readers, he still occasionally forgets what ordinary means to a lot of people, even people who might conceivably pick up a book about maths if it gets a good enough review†††.  So I made the mistake of buying 1089 AND ALL THAT by David Acheson.  Mathematicians.  Spare me.  I should have paid more attention to who was giving it all those glowing reviews:  'An instant classic . . . an inspiring little masterpiece' Mathematical Association of America.   'Highly accessible and entertaining' The Mathematical Association.   'Great fun' Mathematics Today. Boldface mine.  Please.  These bozos wouldn't know 'accessible' and 'fun' if it bit them on the ends of their pocket calculators.‡  Do literary nerds misunderstand average pizza-eating TV-watching ordinary people this badly?   Have I ever convinced someone whose major reading to date has been the ads on the walls of the subway/tube/metro/underground and the sports pages that they should start right in on MOBY DICK or BLEAK HOUSE?  Anyway.  1089 begins with the trick about twiddling two three-figure numbers around in a set pattern that means the final answer is always 1089.  Fine.  I'm with him so far.  But that's as far as I am with him.‡‡  I felt distinctly ill at ease with Konigsberg's seven bridges—there was no 'of course' about the solution to me—but I crashed off the rails for good with Euclid's proof that prime numbers are infinite‡‡‡.  That was on page twenty-five.  The next paragraph begins:  'But some problems in number theory are more tricky.'  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.  As one of the celebratory reviews says 'David Acheson works his way up to chaos and catastrophe theory.'  Well, yes, I'd say so.  But probably not quite in the way the reviewer meant.  And . . . he does it in 169 small, heavily illustrated pages.  Can you say MASSIVE ASSUMPTIONS UNAVOIDABLY MADE HERE?§

            Maybe the hellhound has streamed enough to allow me to lie in a hot bath and reread some Georgette Heyer for a while. 

* * *

* I've taken hellhounds with me to my voice lesson twice, I think, in similar situations, but neither Oisin's house nor any bell tower I've ever met has a good driveway/window ratio for observation.^ 

^ And may I add that during the writing of this blog post the theory that the geysering hellhound needs to be kept under close and constant scrutiny has been borne out.  Plentifully.  Twice.   

** I know I've blithered about these people before:   http://www.turtlemat.co.uk/

The mats are not, in fact, supernatural, and you still have to both sweep your floor and put the mats through the washing machine occasionally.  They are nonetheless a great aid in the war against entropy and critter effluvia.  And they're pretty. 

http://www.turtlemat.co.uk/Maple-Leaf-doormat/

http://www.turtlemat.co.uk/Cup-Cake-mat/

They're also pretty expensive, but I'm not going to buy any more till MYSTERY NOVEL^ goes in.  At the end of January. 

^ Mwa hahahahaha 

*** AAAAAUGH.  It is very difficult to be a good citizen when the physical properties of viscous liquids are against you. 

† I am counting on hellhounds not being bright enough to figure out that geysering = hellgoddess staying home = more time on sofa.  

†† What the eff is effing algebra, for example.  Sure, I can recognise a wodge of squiggles containing letters and numbers and bizarre specialist symbols not found on any sane keyboard and  (probably) an equal sign in there somewhere as (probably) algebra or semi-algebra or once-having-had-something-to-do-with-algebra-before-it-became-the-answer-to-the-known-universe^, but what makes it algebra?  Wikipedia's answer just makes me cry:

Algebra is the branch of mathematics concerning the study of the rules of operations and relations, and the constructions and concepts arising from them, including terms, polynomials, equations and algebraic structures. Together with geometry, analysis, topology, combinatorics, and number theory, algebra is one of the main branches of pure mathematics. 

^ Wait, that was 42, wasn't it?  No algebra.    

††† This one:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/apr/17/alex-bellos-adventures-numberland-maths I posted it when told you about finally getting the little sod-all downloaded onto Pooka.  

‡ I meant to say—I meant to fish this bit of the conversation out of the forum—I too had a slide rule.  Slide rules were cool.  As I recall it mostly took me more time lining up the tiny rows, hoarsely whispering prayers and genuflecting than it would have just to do the calculations on a piece of paper but there were one or two things I couldn't do on paper.  Square roots, maybe?  It's not an era of my life I remember at all clearly.  But I did like my slide rule.  I think it's sort of sad that slide rules have been so comprehensively eliminated.  If people are still driving horse-drawn carts, why couldn't a few nutters still be using slide rules?  I have similar feelings about abaci, but I think people do still use them.^ 

^ Alex Bellos talks about both slide rules and abaci.  Abacuses.  Whatever.    

‡‡ No, I liked the jigsaw puzzle proof of Pythagoras' theorem (about the frelling right-angle triangle) too.  

‡‡‡ I feel I'm doing well to know what a prime number is. 

§ What does a wavy equal sign mean?  So far as I can find, he never tells you—and gods forbid there should be a glossary of terms^—wavies just start showing up in equations.  Although by that time I'd pretty much lost the will to live so I may have missed something.  

^ There is however a list of books for further reading.  Mm hmm.  No Georgette Heyer, for some reason.