My first blog

This morning, while partaking of my coffee, a student at a nearby community college saw me solving a geometry problem.  Now, the decades have taken their toll and I hardly look like a typical college student so, he came to the next logical conclusion “Do you teach?”  “No, not formally, anyway.”  “Well, why do you do this?”

Mathematics problems are something I just do, I never thought of why until this morning and, therefore, the beginning of this blog.

I suppose I could say that, at age 59, I do them to keep myself sharp.  Does it work?  Well, as you read more and more of what I post, you can decide that for yourself.

There are myriad geometry problems available on the Internet.  One of the best such sites that I have found is http://www.gogeometry.com which is touted as being “From the Land of the Incas.”  Wherever it comes from, there are many very good geometry problems that are just at that right point of complexity for someone who has been through high school geometry – hard enough to be challenging, but not so difficult as to be overwhelming at first glance.  Naturally, some problems are more difficult than others, and – to their eternal credit – they invite you to post solutions to them.  Today is Monday, 31 March 2014; Friday, I stumbled on problem 990 on gogeometry.com.   I did not see a solution posted, and I put it aside for the weekend, as I was occupied with other things.  This morning, I took up the problem and solved it, and I was in the midst of cleaning it up when that young student approached me and asked me why I do it.  A little later on, I will post my solution, as I wrote it out, for now I shall ruminate on why I do it.

Mind you, I have been doing this for years, no, decades, and while I have thought about why I do this, this is the first time I have tried explaining it to someone else.  I am, and I always have been, a strong believer in the hacker ethos.  Always try to understand how things work.  I was fascinated by the guys (and they always seemed to be guys) who worked at the travelling carnivals that occasionally visited my home town.  They made carnival rides from Ford Model A axles and tractor drive shafts, electric motors, plywood and paint.  To my young mind, this was fascinating.  It was fascinating when I bought a second hand book about radio and I actually started repairing them – ah the wonders of a “zinc-plated vacuum tube culture” as Mr. Spock so eloquently stated it – and if that doesn’t establish my nerd credentials I don’t know what will.  Then when I went to the radio parts shop in my town, back in the days when such still existed, and I asked for one of those tubes, there were people there who knew exactly where it was and, if they didn’t have that tube, they just knew which tubes would work just as well in its place.

I was intrigued and soon learned there were people who could do this with automobile parts and appliance parts, too.  Yes I was intrigued and I should have stopped right there, but I was on a quest to ultimate knowledge of how everything worked.  The point of all this is that there have always been hackers, the people who understand how that radio works, then disassemble it, then reassemble it and listen to the news in Shanghai, or work on their cars to make them accelerate faster.  Now, people hack computers and even life itself.  Many people are frightened by this, I suppose because you can’t “see” the bits and bytes floating around inside a microprocessor chip and there is always that lingering fear that one of the biopunk hackers will create a disease that overwhelms the world.  I am getting outside the scope of this essay, so I will talk more about this in a later posting.  For now, I will say that I was never really satisfied with understanding computers or any of the myriad electronic gadgets that permeate modern life, oh no, I had to understand how the world itself works, and that means mathematics and logic and I already realize that I would have done far, far better hacking computers and video games instead of the universe, but, oh well, he says with resignation just short of entering his seventh decade.

So I do geometry problems.  Why?  It started when I was young.   One of my teachers was fascinated with the pyramids – lots of people are and, as one would expect, this has spawned a lot of nonsense.  To give you an example, in high school I hung out with someone who believed, I mean he really believed, that if you placed a razor blade inside a pyramid, it would never dull.  He also believed that if you placed food inside a pyramid, it would never spoil or turn rancid.  Mind you, he never actually built a pyramid from whatever scrap materials were lying around to test this (then again, neither did I).  When he blade dulled or the tuna salad sandwich started rotting away, he would have just said: “the pyramids were made from cut stone and this cardboard does not have the same effect.”  or his measurements were off (he was fascinated by the sheer precision of the pyramids) or he wasn’t doing this or that which the people of the Nile Valley did so well, so long ago.  Now, I really think the stuff he believed was utter nonsense but, to my mind even then I was absolutely certain that an understanding of geometry was essential to building a pyramid – any pyramid.  Granted, you need other things: a central authority to issue orders, an established social system, a system of writing to pass down orders, means of quarrying and cutting building stone (as well as an abundant supply of that stone) and an established system of measurement.  All true, but without the geometry, you aren’t building anything.

Geometry me led to logic and whether you are taking apart a pyramid or a toaster, everything is built around logic.   There is a certain order to things, and, that order makes sense.  Me?  I was, and I still am, fascinated by this logical order to things.  If you want to understand things, you should be fascinated too, otherwise it is a hopeless quest, whether you are tackling crocheting antimacassars or taking on questions of galactic structure.  Intelligence is really little more than recognizing patterns in phenomena; given a good memory and a desire to learn things (and I was blessed – or cursed – with all of these things), then the world is your oyster, to paraphrase Pistol in The Merry Wives of Windsor (Act II, scene 2, right at the beginning)).  Think about that: if you can discern the underlying patterns, you can not only solve problems, you can also solve the problems on those silly intelligence tests that measure whatever it is that intelligence tests measure.  While that may be one of the most unimportant skills of all in this world, at least it does impress some people.

Intelligence is all well and good, but the memory is a problem: I keep telling myself that I have to learn to control it.  I also realize that if I have not learned to control it by now, I probably (read “almost certainly”) never will.  Think about it: I can remember every lover’s caress just as I can remember every crummy thing anyone has ever done to me.  Problem is that when I take stock, there have been far, far too few lover’s caresses just as there have been far, far too many crummy things in my life.  People are fascinated when I look at an old movie and name almost everyone in the scene or when I recite dialogue from a film I saw forty or more years ago.  Sometimes, my head gets so full of minutiae that I cannot perform as a normal person would; holding a job is exceedingly difficult and well…that makes life a real mess when rent falls due or when I want to eat something sustaining.  But, life goes on anyway and I have typed enough.  I can see that this will become a catharsis through my fingertips.

So, I get lost in philosophical ruminations and geometry problems.  I will write, here and elsewhere.  I will talk about anything and everything that crosses my mind, what I have been reading and doing.  In that spirit, here is my solution to GoGeometry problem #990 as I wrote it out.  I think I have arrived “there” and I know it could do with some cleaning up, but here it is…..

I first wrote this on March 31 and now I am finally getting to post it.  I have, however, prepared some other material in the meantime.

My approach to solving problem 990

Remember, this is just my first post here….please go easy on me.