Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Secret Pythagorean Jam Session

Once upon a time, when I was a college sophomore, I signed up for an intro to proofs class on a whim, and it changed my life.

One thing many people these days don't know about me is that I did not ever consider myself a math person before my freshman year of college. I think I considered myself a history-English-music-art-language person (not necessarily in that order). My junior high and high school electives were art, cooking, music theory, creative writing, and more art. I played the piano. I read Dostoevsky for fun. I wrote story scenes in the margins of my notebooks. I knew that Prismacolor colored pencils were far (far, far) superior to Crayola. I listened to the classical station on the radio and jumped at the chance for a summer job as an usher at the Hollywood Bowl.

And although I made it through calculus in high school, it never even occurred to me to like math.

But in college I was persuaded to retake calculus (I took the honors section so I wouldn't feel like a complete slacker for not skipping on ahead to Calc II), and my professor was Dr. Fearnley, a mathematician with a wonderful English accent who for some reason thought I was brilliant. His words. I knew, of course, that it was really just because I had taken calculus before, but his confidence in me made me consider the possibility that maybe he was right, that maybe I was a math person, at least a little bit. So when registration time came around, I went ahead and signed up not just for Calc II, but also for Math 190, a class outside of the standard algebra-calculus sequence, a class my math major roommate said was intended to show people if they really did like math. Real math. Theorems, lemmas, proofs, epsilons, deltas, and all. 

A last-minute schedule change put Dr. Fearnley in as the professor, and to this day I look at the course as one of the best I ever took at BYU. He taught using a version of the Moore method, which is a very student-centered approach that can easily be either frustrating or exhilarating. Mostly I found it exhilarating. I experienced a sort of wonder of discovery almost every time I went to class, and almost every time I met with my study group, and almost every time I sat down to work on my own. Calc II that semester was just okay. Linear Algebra the following semester was bewildering. But my memory of the proofs class was so powerful that when I found myself completely unhappy with my speech pathology major, I woke up one day and spontaneously marched myself down to the math department office to declare myself a math education major. That, in turn, has had a huge impact on the course my life has taken.

I have been thinking about this because last night a conversation with Melanie C. about a recent Geometer's Sketchpad math project she posted on Facebook turned to the topic of Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land, a little half hour Disney film from 1959 extolling the virtues of mathematics. We actually watched this film in the aforementioned proofs class one day, just for fun, and so I always associate it with Dr. Fearnley and Math 190. 

Disney has quite a stranglehold on the rights and the film is insanely hard to get ahold of. The DVD costs about $50, and has only recently become available at all. But YouTube hasn't succumbed to Disney's iron fist, and this afternoon I watched bits and pieces of Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land for the first time in almost a decade. With Pi Day fast approaching (Saturday! 3/14! Mark your calendars!), I thought I'd share it with those of my readers who have 9 minutes to spare. This is the segment that deals with how mathematics relates to one of my other favorite things, music. The facts are a bit dubious, but maybe it will bring back some elementary school memories for a few of you :).



4 comments:

Abominable's Main Squeeze said...

Fun! The square roots at the beginning of the short made me think of The Phantom Tollbooth.

I had a computer science professor who used to always say that artistic people made the best programmers because they had the ability to find more creative programming solutions. I think that's true. Since programming is very math and logic based, I think that would apply to all maths. No wonder your professor thought you were brilliant (so do I).

Happy pi day!

Kelsey said...

Ok...I like math too actually. But I think Speech Pathology is awesome too.

k nelle said...

I never would have guessed that you weren't always a math person; that's pretty great that you've retained all of your creative (right) brain stuff too! I used to watch that movie at my grandparents! :)

Erin Gong said...

Go Prismacolor!