A History of Math

A History of Math

It has come to this: I have drawn to two sheets of study notes, one a compressed guide to answers from the sample final, the other a filtered collection of previous sets of notes. It's like cooking a good sauce; reduce, reduce, reduce.

I have drawn up ANOVA tables and carefully notated the mathematical relationships of SSR, MSR, SSE, MSE, and their totals, along with F values and d.f values. I sort of get it. It never seemed so clear in class. Additionally, I have written out various forms of regression, with notes as to how to calculate a confidence interval and test a hypothesis. I even used summary notation, which I had never heard of until about ten months ago.

There is no doubt it has been a difficult semester. A friend at work assures me not to worry because, naturally, I have a "girl brain". This is cold comfort since many of my female friends have been more mathematically inclined, and even I lean towards the analytical, albeit more literary analysis, the raven on the telephone pole, that sort of thing. ANd as I think back, man of the girls i have been friends with, or even just wanted to be friends with, were more mathematically inclined.

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I do recall when I was in fifth grade and we moved to California, this girl named Andrea tried to correct me when I worked a multiplication problem. While in Oklahoma, Sister Eileen had taught us to use the trailing zeroes as we tallied each line, in Virginia, Mrs. D had taught us not to use trailing zeroes, as long as we kept our decimal places correct. Andrea thought I was working the problem incorrectly because I left out the zeroes. Our teacher intervened and allowed me to continue. Here is a tangential thought - the sense that in education, in academe, the adults are always hovering just above us, ready to intervene.

A few years later, however, my talents began to diverge from my peers. In Los Arbelos Middle School (The trees) we were given to Mr. Cheshire, an older, pony-tailed asian man with an interesting approach to classroom management. First of all, his classroom was full of plants. They didn't just line the walls; they were interspersed throughout the classroom and formed dividers between desks. Second, no more than four desks were next to each other, and even at that, the four students could not directly see one another. Finally, he ha mirrors everywhere, and he taught using an overhead projector. 

Lest an over-active imagination conjure up images of a guerilla war in a southeast Asian jungle, let me assure you otherwise. There were clear sight lines from every desk to the projector, and from his spot to each desk, but students could not see each other directly or easily. There was an electric pump for a small garden pool, an with the plants and Mr. Cheshire's soothing, accented explanations, we could al concentrate on Pre-Algebra. 

I was not so fortunate the ext year. The training wheels off, the soothing garden gone, I was to suffer through three ungainly attempts to learn full-bore Algebra at two different schools. The Challenger exploded. We moved overseas. Choose an excuse.

By the time I was in high school, I was dreadfully bored. I got quadratics. I got graphs. I started reading books perched under my desk, magazines slipped in the covered of our texts. When I looked up, I no longer understood what we were doing. Left to my own devices, I found myself scrambling to decipher hieroglyphs. "You're lost, you're just lost," said Mr. Wolf, helpful as ever. I dropped out and didn't finish the required half-credit till I moved to another school.

From that point forward, I did everything I could to avoid math. I majored in what is commonly considered the Liberal Arts. I worked in a computer lab. I wasn't sure what had happened; as a child I had liked science-y things. My grandfather encouraged an appreciation of airplanes, and I once aspired to be an aerospace engineer. I didn't agonize over it; I just accepted it. I knew enough to balance my checkbook and create a budget, as well as estimate the cost of gas for a given trip. What else did I need?

So now, well over ten years later, I am being asked to find derivatives, standard deviations, variance, and oh, so much more. And I find it, truly, fascinating. I wish someone had just told me that these numbers have a story to tell, tat somewhere behind the seemingly impenetrable arrangement of Greek, Roman, and English letters, there was a series of relationships as complex as any soap opera. OMG, f(x)  is totally going to indicate a high rate of return on an equities-weighted portfolio, but just wait until f(y) enters the picture! ANd look at that regression family - B-aught is the tentpole in that family circus, everyone else is just an explanatory variable. What would one predict of such a family? We have a formula for that: y=B-aught+B1X1+B2X2+B3X3...BnXn+E (noise).

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Two of my friends actually teach math; two others are bonafide scientists who work on things like cancer and bird flu research. For them, regression testing actually tells them about their work; for me, regression testing, in my line of work, means check to see if Microsoft Word blows up on an iMac G4.

"Girl Brain" my eye. Don't patronize me.

I learn. Sister Eileen - remember her, whom I mentioned at the top? She got us to memorize multiplication tables by keeping us at recess and reciting them, like the Lord's Prayer, over and over and over. That doesn't work so much with pre-Calculus, or whatever the hell it is that I'm using now. However, it does demonstrate that working through these problems, over an over and over again, does work. it does sink in, and the relationships take hold.

And so, I try. I take an exam tomorrow. I don't expect to do well, but I do expect to have learned a little more about what goes on in these formulations. At the very least, I can ask smarter questions, and not in a show-off way. We are told this is a foundation level class, and already, I can look ahead and see it referenced in other classes that I expect to take.

That, in the end, is what education, in any topic, is really about.