my internet file cabinet.
I was going back through some old posts and rediscovered this. The young woman who wrote this went on to be valedictorian and she is now pursuing a writing career at Williams college.
welikesnow
“ Math is the painting you can climb into, the song whose notes you can lean on. It is the creation of the searching, unsatisfied mind that, discouraged by the physical world, creates another. This new world is perfect and can be explained elegantly. There are no wars, only equality signs. If a number gets too complicated, we give it a letter (pi, e, phi). If we don’t know the number, we give it a variable (x). If the number doesn’t exist, we pretend it does (i). We make things up so we can conquer them simply and elegantly after a journey — playful or strenuous. In a way, mathematicians are not only idealists, but escapists. Unlike other artists who create things to respond to life — Picasso’s “Guernica”, Dvorak’s “New World” — math creates its own world wanting to abandon this one. But whether math is created to show the world how perfect life can be or to pretend this one doesn’t exist, math is surely an art, and not something that can be confined to the green and black of my calculator screen. ”
WattzOn
Visualize your personal energy consumption. To do this accurately may require a bit of research.
