I started to write a post today about a cool conversation I recently had with a friend on an interesting math topic, until I realized it just wouldn’t work. It’s not that the concepts were out of anyone’s grasp — the ideas we were discussing were all very simple and logical and beautiful, and certainly not beyond the reach of anyone who reads this blog.<\/p>\n
It was rather that the only way to discuss those ideas would require the notation of math. And I am all too acutely aware that most people have a very unfriendly relationship with mathematical notation. If you write something like ex<\/sup><\/i>, or x + iy<\/i>, most people will start to panic, and promptly set about finding somewhere else to be.<\/p>\n The ideas that these expressions represent are not at all difficult, but somehow the very fact that it’s “math” stops people dead — you end up discussing not the ideas, but rather the wall of incomprehension surrounding the way those ideas are expressed.<\/p>\n It’s a shame, because mathematical ideas have the kind of immense beauty found in so few things — a glorious sunset or a great Shakespearean sonnet come to mind. But unless something changes radically, that beauty will likely remain, for most people, out of reach.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I started to write a post today about a cool conversation I recently had with a friend on an interesting math topic, until I realized it just wouldn’t work. It’s not that the concepts were out of anyone’s grasp — the ideas we were discussing were all very simple and logical and beautiful, and certainly … Continue reading “No math”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5186"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5186"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5196,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5186\/revisions\/5196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}