I'm not even going to ask what makes that pretty.

e lives over there, with the logarithms, naturally, and π is over there with the geometry (they're both irrational and don't play well with others), and -1, well, it's right here with the everyday numbers. Don't even ask where i lives -- it's complex.

Yet? Together? They all make each other. As a maths student, there was absolutely no reason to expect these to be the pieces in the jigsaw puzzle, but working through that proof is like having a jigsaw puzzle that's solving itself and dragging you along with it and bam! Suddenly the pieces snap together and you know the picture for the first time.

You might not understand the picture, but it sure is purty,

tommy, it's Euler's Identity (or according to Feynman, "The most remarkable formula in mathematics").

Timelies all!

I did well in pretty much all the math classes I took.(which was through third semester calculus in college) Math just didn't interest me enough to go farther. Not to mention that my schedule was full of major-related classes.(Odd fact: I was one class away from a Chem minor. Unfortunately, that class was PChem. I didn't want to go near it)

God, I may be a dork. From scanning the wikipedia page, I found an old tagline of mine:

that is surely true, it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means. But we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth

God, I may be a dork. From scanning the wikipedia page, I found an old tagline of mine:

What's funny is that (IIRC) you took that tagline from a post of mine, where I was quoting it (dunno if it was from wikipeida or someplace else).

Fuck me. What's my damn problem? I just picked at the scab again.

In response to the Broadsheet blog entry about the asshat who dismissed Dowd's book with the sneer that she's clearly eaten up with spinster bitterness over the fact that "Women have expiration dates and men don't," there's this letter:

That John Ross has written a post in response to Maureen Dowd's recent anti male diatribe is amusing to a 49 year old Grandfather and Father of 5. I married young my first marriage. Didn't want children in my second marriage at 40. John is merely articulating biology. That Feminists so many believed and made a life and career during their prime years of Fecundity is not John Ross's fault it is the women's. I have two daughters my oldest married young and has 3 Sons of her own. Women's eggs are most fertile when they are young. It also lessens the issue of birth defects and gives Women an opportunity to raise children and after they go off to school to resume a career.

Women who follow this life script based upon biology rather than a PC way of living articulated by Lesbians are more likely to have a successful family and a happy husband. Building a life together is what relationships that last are all about. I have observed this from my 80 year old Father and my Mother. They are still in love after 50 years.

Make these people go away and STOP READING MY MAGAZINE. Also, make me STOP READING THEIR LETTERS. Gah!!!!1!

Plei! How is the adorable Lilybean?? I say I lurk because I mostly just sit here reading, and not saying anything. Pathetic, I know.

I was however noting the other day when you posted pictures that your daughter has the most amazing large and beautiful eyes.

And what ita, and tommy, said. This whole big blackboard of equations that resolves to those tiny, unrelated letters. Just purty.

a PC way of living articulated by Lesbians

Huh. I'm a lesbian. Who knew?

Women who follow this life script based upon biology rather than a PC way of living articulated by Lesbians are more likely to have a successful family and a happy husband.

Yes, I'm sure it's just the misguided desire to be PC keeping all those Lesbians from having happy husbands...

I went and read the Salon letters, for I am weak. And now, also horrified. I'm thinking that the whole "editor" concept is kind of key to LTE -- otherwise, you have wanky blog comments instead.

In more fun news (really!), my math ran out of steam in the 3rd semester of calc. I still had that beautiful eureka thing going with all the concepts at that point, but my lifelong habit of never doing the homework finally caught up with me. I never got to the more advanced stuff -- which I agree is all about the beautiful and the visual and the patterns and stuff just FITS, damn it, and not about the numbers much at all -- except as a bystander, and I still dream of grasping topology.

My obligatory math rant, though, is about alg2/trig/pre-calc. It's incredibly telling, and really typical of much wider populations than here, that so many people have posted that they liked algebra and geometry and then tanked. Those are clear and well-defined and graspable things, with some real joy to them. So is calculus. But the educational biz has a bunch of other stuff that they have to stick in there somewhere before you get back to the fun stuff, and they long ago settled on doing it in the form of a couple years' force-feeding of rote memorization and looking up stuff in tables (for lo, I am of the pre-yes you can use a calculator in school generation) and assorted crap that's not really obviously related to anything else you do before or after. And unless you're one of the ones who's wired to go on with it (in which case you're going to endure all the crap anyway), it falls at just the time where they say "you're done with your high school requirements, so you don't really need to do this any more (and we'll just do you a huge disservice by ignoring the fact that it's gonna really suck to try to pick this up again when you have to do it in college when you're a year or two out of practice, for the math, she is like a muscle that can atrophy), and, well, I guess you're just not a math person." And so it's no wonder so many people burn out at exactly that point.