Friday, March 27, 2009

Maths in the real world

It can be hard to follow a teacher when they're just talking about abstracts, things that don't make any sense in the real world. Like chemistry, before i took a paper on actual uses of chemistry in the real world, (CSI, Macgyver, poisons, ammunition, fingerprinting, airport baggage screening etc). My Uncle who was a brilliant and dedicated maths teacher most of his life, went to great efforts in an attempt to make the things he taught applicable to us in the real world, in an attempt to stretch out our minimalist attention span. One day after school while i was waiting for a ride home, he started talking about the Golden Mean. This was the first thing to catch my attention. It sounded like the stuff of legends, along the lines of the Greek story of the Golden fleece. The Golden mean is a ratio, the most aesthetically pleasing when used in art and pictures, and found in myriad places in nature. From honeybees, to fingers and toes, to music, to a rams horns, to food and so on and so forth. The Fibonacci sequence of numbers was based on it, taking 1, assuming 0 comes before it and counting every two digits upwards, 0,1,1,2,3,5,8 etc = 1.618.... The Golden ratio, the Golden mean, and many other names to attempt to express its beauty. Even the books of the bible follow the sequence - 66 books, 27 in the New Testament and 39 in the Old. To be continued...

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