more evidence i shouldn’t have majored in the liberal arts! i totally did this as a kid! not quite as obsessively. but the braiding structure thing, yeah i did that. i also would tap my fingers and i figured out when i was pretty young that if you tapped in groups of anything other than 5 or 10 or 15… it would take five rounds for you to end on the pinky. then in middle school i realized that what i had figured out was that the least common multiple of 5 and any number not divisible by 5 was that number times 5… and later of course i learned that applied to any prime number, or (more broadly) to any two numbers that didn’t share any common factors…Via Boing Boing, computer scientist Christine Alvarado’s story about how My Little Pony turned her into a computer scientist:
I had several small plastic Ponies that I used to play make-believe with my friends. But I had one larger, plush My Little Pony, a bright-green stuffed horse with a vivid pink mane and tail that I played with all by myself. I would sit for hours on my own, braiding and rebraiding its tail. I developed a system for braiding the tail of my Pony that taught me about mathematical concepts— from division to recursion.
When I started, I took the hair on the Pony’s tail and divided it into three pieces for braiding. Soon I became bored with a single braid. I was up to starting with twenty-seven pieces (nested down to nine braids, then to three and then one) and then on to eighty-one. All the while I was learning about math: I saw that division is the process of taking a large number of things and grouping them into a smaller number of groups. In order to end up with one even braid at the end, I had to be able to divide the initial number evenly by three, then by three,and then by three again, until I ended up with just one braid.
With braiding on my mind, I began to see recursion everywhere. One night at the dinner table, I was eating cauliflower and I noticed that it had the same recursive structure of my braids. Moreover, the cauliflower seemed to continue to recurse forever. I began to divide the piece of cauliflower on my plate, determined to find the base level, but it split further and further until the pieces were too tiny to hold. My parents gave me a strange glance, and I continued to eat, still fascinated by the underlying structure of my vegetables.
god you guys numbers are SO COOL ughhh i should have studied them. this is honestly my #1 biggest regret, on an emotional level, about not having paid attention to my mental health issues earlier than i did, is that it made me kind of check out on calculus, and then it made me first switch to an easier, less work-intensive version of, and then very nearly fail multivariable calculus freshman year and after that i decided i didn’t like math anymore and i wasn’t any good at it besides. and i used to LOVE math. i feel like i lost something that was really special to me. maybe i’ll transfer to CUNY and double major in math and education and take six hundred years to graduate.
reblogged for SPARKLEPONIES and also because you are one of the few people that I’ve known who really does seem to find joy in math, so maybe you should study it? it’s not too late…
Okay, story time!
You know how in college you have to take placement tests for math and writing? (Well… I don’t know if you did, but I did.) Well, I’ve loved math FOREVAAAAA and was in AP Calc and all that, so when I took the test, I placed out of math. Like, by a lot. Like, got the highest score you could get on the test. After these tests they sat everyone down in a room with a couple of advisers who basically told us what classes we should take based on availability and our majors.
So I look at the slip that tells me the placement score and it says what math course I should take based on that score. I don’t remember what it was, but it was some higher-level class. I’m all geeked out and go to sign up immediately because of course it’s not full. Then this man, adviser dude, pulls me aside and insists that this is Serious Business and I do NOT want to sign up for this advanced math class! He goes on and on for at least 10 minutes about how I’m a freshman and I shouldn’t overwhelm myself and I don’t even need math for my major, so why would I take this class when I can take something else, like an elective?
Now, I’m sure that he meant well. (Well, that’s not entirely true. I’m damn sure part of it was sexist, especially because my major was Psych and, um, yeah, you kinda need math for that.) But I felt so much pressure from adviser dude, I caved. I dropped the class right there and took something else (don’t even remember what).
Of course, by the time I had room in my schedule to take that class again, I had lost most of my confidence in math, so I never took a math class again. Sure, I took Statistics and that was HELLA fun and an easy A, and then there was Advanced Stats for my Research in Psych requirement. But it wasn’t the same.
I really miss math now, but seeing as how I’ve graduated already, it’s too late for me. So, Isabel, purty please trust your gut and stick with math!
