Russell
Posts: 1082
Joined: April 2005
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Imagine you’re out walking your dog one day, and you happen upon Millie, that spry little old lady that’s just moved in three doors down. In the course of small talk, Millie says that, what with raising kids, juggling jobs, etc., she’s never had the time to learn as much mathematics as she would have liked. But now she’s 72, widowed, kids on their own… just for the mental exercise, she’s trying to learn it now, if only to an educated layman’s level.
In a moment of neighborliness, you volunteer to spend Thursday evenings tutoring her. You cover the basics. You explain what’s the difference between algebra and geometry. You go over some basic theorems. You spend 3 consecutive weeks on the elegance of the Pythagorean proof. You show how trigonometry might be used in calculating space shuttle trajectories. After a couple of months, you’re ready to introduce the idea of the calculus.
You bone up on it yourself (it’s been a while! ), you prepare a few illustrative examples. You meet Millie at the usual venue, the local Barnes & Noble café, with an armful of books. But before you get underway, Millie has just one question. She was at the beauty salon earlier that week for her blue rinse, when she learned from Madge, the hairdresser, that 8 wasn’t really a number at all; it had been made up out of whole cloth by some pointy headed professor to plug the holes in the theory of mathematics.
What do you say?
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Must... not... scratch... mosquito bite.
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