A bit that's been distracting me recently. About two weeks ago I finished reading the first book in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, Quicksilver, which provides a narrative that encompasses the dispute between Liebniz and Newton regarding who created Calculus first (well... there's a bit more then that, but it provides background for a number of different narratives).
After revisiting the wonderful world of Math through fiction, it finally became clear to me that Calculus is an extension of geometry. Which I blissfully disregarded through the 2 or 3 calc classes I took. Sometimes, the minor epiphanies that you experience from taking a step back and looking at the whole (as opposed to focusing on the abstraction in front of you - in this case, just numbers, symbols, and the operations that translated these from one state to another), allow you to better understand how the smaller details fit together.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment