Colin McEnroe Show: Math For The Nonmathletic
Steven Strogatz explains everything from how we count to imaginary numbers
Ten or 15 years ago, when I was in my forties, I agreed to take the SAT's again and write about it for Men's Health. Long story short, I got an 800 on the verbal, because -- really -- what else had I done for the intervening 20 or 30 years but move words around?
On the math, not so much. On the math I was classified, technically, as a farm product. There are really two Americas. Math and verbal. There are people who live fludily and gracefully in both worlds ... and we hate them.
And yet, we verbal people know, at some level, because we've read essays about it, that there is an inherent beauty in math, that there are deep truths, that there is some dark place and which Goedel's theory of uncertainty reaches out and touches Camus and Mondrian and Thelonius Monk.
The problem is, we never heard anything in any math class we ever took that would confirm that. Maybe today?
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***This episode was produced with help from Jonathan McNicol and originally broadcast on March 15, 2010.***
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