mathscara

[mathscara]

anyway look at the voderberg tile. it's a nonagon (nine sides).

and the only shape that can surround itself completley with only two iterations of itself

and it also creates a spiral tessellation <3

[mathscara]

2, 4, 8, 16: powers of two that most people recognize

32, 64, 128, 256: powers of two that the computer-literate recognize

512, 1024, 2048: powers of two that 2048 players recognize

4096—16384: powers of two that people who recognize powers of two recognize

32768, 65536, 16777216: powers of two that professional computer touchers recognize

131072, 262144, 524288, 1048576: powers of two recognized by those who have walked the grounds of the wizard's tower

2097152, 4194304, 8388608: powers of two which advanced thaumaturges may once have espied...

33554432: what

[mathscara]

When I was a kid, I remember being really astounded by the fact that arithmetic is consistent. Like uh, 2 + 3 + 4 is 9. And 9 - 4 is 5, which is 2 + 3, and 9 - 2 is 7, which is 3 + 4! And 7 is also 6 + 1, and guess what, 9 is also 6 + 1 + 2, and even more amazingly, 6 is 4 + 2, and (remember 9 - 4 is 5) 2 + 2 + 1 is 5! No matter what you do it's always consistent, you can't trick it by adding and subtracting some convoluted sequence of numbers until it gives you an answer that's inconsistent with the rest.

When I was first learning arithmetic I remember that I just found this crazy, like, how does it always work out? That shouldn't be possible. And I figured that, naturally, when I got older, someone would eventually give me the answer to this incredibly pressing question. And, well, it turns out nobody has the answer, and they actually proved that it's impossible for anyone to give a satisfying answer. So, that's a bit disappointing.

[mathscara]

Heartbreaking! The obvious letter to use for this variable isn't available because you already used it for something else!

[mathscara]

My brother (currently in college shooting for a PhD in maths) sent me this at 2 am and informed me that I should “put it on the tumbler”

Jobius Strip

[mathscara]

You don't need to prove yourself to anyone. You're not a theorem. You're an axiom.

[mathscara]

did you know they say calculus is the language of God. did you know they tried to hold math up to infinity like a candle to the void. did you know statisticians plunged into the vastness of random chance and picked out patterns and equations and eight hundred ways to tell you how big your inevitable errors are and how far off those guesses at errors might be. math haters I can't sit with you anymore. human innovation is cradled in these ancient, methodical, desperate attempts at understanding what we are not designed to understand

[mathscara]

A set of tori.

[mathscara]

Math Camp! Pascal's Triangle! Bee!

got over excited drawing this bee for my math camp students.

[mathscara]

I do not like it, and I am sorry I ever had anything to do with it.

- Erwin Schrödinger on quantam mechanics

[mathscara]

High school math: Here's the formula you can use to calculate this. Why does this formula work? We don't know, shut up. University math:

You want to use a formula? Have you proven that it works? While you're at it, have you proven that numbers exist yet?

[mathscara]

[mathscara]

Study Motivation

So I’m in a situation right now that I think a lot of you can relate to. It’s the end of exam period, one exam left and all nighters, cramming and crying have left me exhausted and with no motivation left to study for that last subject on the list. It’s not practical, I see nothing I can gain in studying it.

In the last few days I tried a lot of things to help motivate me :

- studying somewhere else

- switching up the routine

- telling myself I’ll get a reward once I’m fnished

and so on. I even wrote out a list of why I should be studying, what should motivate me and why I feel so down right now.

Nothing worked.

As I was about to just give up or to try somehow, in a blur of sighs and grey and wanting to sleep, to study the material I have to learn,  I stumbled about someone telling me something:

“I think it is a bad idea to study that subject of yours in uni.”

And I asked that person, why would you think that?

“You won’t need much of the maths you learn in your courses for work later on. You don’t need that math for your life.”

And I was stunned. Because, can’t that person just see?

And I explained.

I explained, that I don’t study maths because it’s practical or because I’ll need it later on. I don’t even know by now if I want to work as a mathematician later in life. And you know what? I don’t need to want to do that in order to study maths in uni.

Because maths is not about that.

It’s about challenging yourself to constantly keep improving. To try your best, just to be told that that’s just enough to barely pass. To try and to try and to improve, again and again and again, and to teach yourself on the way a better way of thinking, a better way of doing thinks.

I don’t study maths for the maths, I study it to improve my thinking and to improve myself, in every way possible, in order to become a better person than I was yesterday.

Hell, most people that finish the maths degree that I’m doing don’t work as a clean mathematician afterwards. They do start-ups, they do programming, they help firms to critically review their funding and logical structure. 

And as I explained to that random person on the internet why I, a person that always struggled with maths at school, would study it now at university for over 5 years, I found the motivation again that had left me. 

I don’t study it because I need it in life. It doesn’t matter if I’ll need this one subject later on. That’s not why I’m here. That’s not why I’m hanging on.

Thank you random person for making me remember that.

So: If at one point, all motivation leaves you, imagine someone criticising you for your chosen field of study. 

And whilst you passionately tell them why you think they’re wrong, go find again that spark that you were missing.

[mathscara]

“It was only later that I realised there is this terrible stereotype, that maths is more for men and not for women for various reasons. And when I did get to Cambridge it was very, very male dominated.”

How difficult was that for you?

“I don’t remember it being at the time, I think it became difficult later actually and when I went to Cambridge my Director of Studies at school warned me. It sounds a bit odd but she said “When you get to Cambridge you will meet a whole load of boys from boys schools who will all be better than you. And they’ll all have been pushed really hard at school and they’ll be way ahead and you’re going to find…” So I got to Cambridge and I was expecting to be the worst because although I’d been the best at my school, this teacher had given me the impression I was gonna get there and be the worst.  When I wasn’t the actual worst, I was actually quite pleasantly surprised.

The fact was that there were all these boys who had been pushed very hard before and were way ahead. So would just breeze through and kinda boasted about how easy it was and so I had to learn how to deal with that, well arrogance really, and be OK with it. Then it turned around later because a lot of them when they get to do PhD’s, they discover that they can’t hack it because they have forgotten how to work hard. Or they have come to like maths cos “It’s really easy.” and “Oh, I love this because it’s so easy.”   And then when it gets hard they don’t want to do it anymore.

Whereas, that feeling of having your brain stretch out of your brain is so important when you’re doing maths and if you can’t deal with that, if you think that means you can’t do it. Then a lot of the people who had APPEARED to be better than me, fell by the wayside during PhD’s or in the first post-doc and I carried on.”

Eugenia Cheng, Mathematician [x]

[mathscara]

1/1/23 is a fibonacci

[mathscara]