THIS BOOK IS A GOOD CHRONICLE OF HOW VERSATILE MATHEMATICS IS AND CAN BE IF WELL UNDERSTOOD AND APPLIED.

If you are asked to mention one element in nature that is ambidextrous, I am sure that water will be one of them. The late Fela Anikulapo-Kuti sang about the varied uses that water can be made us of in one of his songs.

water is used in manufacturing various liquid beverages

How we can’t do without water for washing!

Elements aside, one subject in life that is as versatile and can serve a trillion uses to human needs, that is as old as man itself, remember my post on counting?, is mathematics. One branch of mathematics that is prime to modern civilization, without which man would never have dreamt big dreams which have revolutionized science and technology, is calculus.

The count of the modern uses of calculus is endless, but I will attempt to mention some uses that will cover every faculty that man has endeavored to spend money and effort in his research endeavors. According to a professional resource on calculus,Calculus and Analytic Geometry by Thomas and Finney, Economists use calculus to forecast global trends, oceanographers use calculus to formulate theories about ocean currents, meteorologists use it to describe the flow of air in the upper atmosphere, biologists use calculus to forecast population size, medical researchers use calculus to design ultrasound and x-ray equipment for scanning the internal organs of the body, psychologists use calculus to understand optical illusions in visual perceptions and finally, drug companies use calculus to determine profitable inventory levels. The list can go on and on; I just have to stop here.

But whether calculus can help you to lose weight, or survive a zombie apocalypse, that is the subject of a book by Jennifer Ouellette, The Calculus Diaries: How math can help you lose weight, Win in Vegas, and survive a Zombie Apocalypse. You can get it from the Amazon.com bookstore online, or even Barnes and Noble.

The varied applications of calculus aside, the history of Calculus is laced with colorful characters lilke Isaac Newton, Baron Leibniz, René Descartes and Pierre de Fermat. The book also presents in vivid details how calculus can fit into your daily life; how you can use calculus to even calculate the stats on your blogger and Facebook Insights dashboard.

According to the reviews posted on the Amazon.com page for the book, I read that Jennifer Ouellette writes with a touch of humor, beauty and elegance. That her stint as a science writer and in physics gave her much material and experience to brace this daunting subject. She covers the basic principles very well. So if you are a student preparing for undergraduate degrees and you think an understanding of calculus is essential to your success, then you should lay hold of this book.

But the subject, calculus, has already defined the readership for the book, right? Don’t be in much of a hurry. Readers who are mathphobic, or afraid of mathematics, can even enjoy reading it. It doesn’t come with much mathematical formulas that could be daunting, one of the negative sides according to another reviewer but the writer did her majors in English and understands what mathphobic concerns her readers might and would surely face.

Why not get a hold of this book. I’d recommend it myself. I followed a link to her website and just subscribed to her blog feed.

So, for those who want to brave the world of calculus, I’d recommend the book:The Calculus Diaries: How math can help you lose weight, Win in Vegas, and survive a Zombie Apocalypse




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PATTERNS CAN EVEN BE FOUND ON THE SIMPLE HANDS OF A DIGITAL CLOCK.

When scientists discover new things they are aided most times by the patterns or models on which those objects are based. Calendars, for example the Gregorian calendar, were based on patterns drawn from natural observations, and so for so many scientific examples, like gravity, relativity etcetera. The list can go on and on.

I like to pretend I can be an inventor. Pretense or make-believe, where one works towards it, can lead to undiscovered treasures. So in my make-believe in looking for patterns in everyday objects like license plate numbers, colors of clothes people wear, shoe sizes at the market and telling the time, I search for factual patterns, hoping to make a sale.

Voilà, I did succeed one unholy day. That day was the tenth of October, two thousand and ten or when written in numerals, 10/10/10. It’s not everyday that the date and time gives you a pattern, and by the way, those do not look like patterns, just chance coincidences, so I decided to concentrate on the time.

Another eureka! It will surprise that when you copy and paste the hour hand on the minute and seconds side, you can get a pattern for every hour of the day, whether counting by 12-hour or 24-hours?

Let’s start from one o’clock in the morning. You will always get to the time: 01:01:01, that is one minute and one second to the hour. Another is 02:02:02 or two minutes and two seconds to two o’clock in the morning.

 

11

11

11

I noticed that every hour can be copied and pasted on the minutes and seconds side.

13

13

13

Even when the hour is close to midnight.

22

22

22

I really cannot find any functional value of this patterns except for the fact that they possess some aesthetic value. Also, I find much delight waiting for the next pattern to appear on the digital watch embedded on my handset.

There are times though when the patterns do not really make good matches on the hour, especially when you want to flip the hour.

For example, at one o’clock, when you flip the hour and paste it on the minutes side and then flip the minutes and paste it on the seconds side, sometimes the patterns follow but sometimes they do not.

01

10

01

The one o’clock hour do follow beautifully, but these pattern is followed until six o’clock.

05

50

05

But at six o’clock, when you flip 06 at the hour, you do not get a translation for the minute hand.

Notwithstanding, from ten o’clock, the pattern starts to make another connection.

10

01

10

 

11

11

11

And this connection continues until the fifteenth hour.

15

51

15

And breaks up at the sixteenth hour, when 16 cannot translate to the minute when you flip the hour readings. But at the twentieth hour, our pattern continues again.

20

02

20

 

23

32

23

Looking for unbroken patterns on flipping the hour hand is not possible, but the start and continuation of the patterns can create a good aesthetic graphic display.

As I said before, patterns in nature if one cannot find the functional value yet, can serve for their aesthetic value and also as a time killer, to kill the boredom. When I do find another pattern in nature, I’ll surely be blogging on it.

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IF ONE GREEN BOTTLE ACCIDENTALLY FALLS DOWN…

We all love nursery rhymes. I do remember, as if it was yesterday, the rhyme about counting ten green bottles on the wall, subtracting them by one until all the bottles on the wall have fallen down. I think it is a skill children learn about subtracting and how to count backwards.

Counting has always been with man since he knew how to acquire things. When one discovers that he has started accumulating material objects beyond the singletons, then he develops the innate ability to be able to remember how many they are, if one is lost, which it was and plan towards acquiring more. That is counting. While counting, one also develops the innate ability of naming the things counted so that he can group them together for remembrance and memorization. Therefore, a man possessing goats, yams and lands, names these things and counts each of them so he can distinguish all of them while being able to group them as his properties.
The simplest way of counting, which we all learn even from infancy, is to count by watching others. Then we express this ability with our lips. This is what some call recitation. From recitation, we decided to develop the number system so that counting can be done easily and quickly. Numbering can be done through tally or writing out numerals depending on whatever system one desires.

If you visit the market, you will be astonished that counting is a skill traders practice and have learnt to master. They have to know the totals of what they possess. They count as if by rote, even while sleeping, while walking and eating. They count the cash they have, the goods in the store, the debt they owe, the number of times the relative or girlfriend who comes to solicit for funds come every month. They have learnt to count so well that this skill has become a personal sin.

I think that is why from counting, they have also learnt to calculate.
Without the ability to calculate, we wouldn’t find a meaning to what is being counted. If you are counting forwards, do you wish to do addition or multiplication? Do not forget that multiplication is addition done in groups. Some count by adding one to the things before, some in groups of five i.e in multiples of five; some can also count backwards, doing subtraction or divisions.
Calculation makes it possible that you can predict the outcome of future counting. For example, if you know you have x goods in the store and you sold y number of them, by calculation of the subtraction, you can predict the outcome of a future count of those goods taking y from x.

Calculation also helps the counter understand the outcome of past counting and design appropriate counting projects. By calculating our counting, we can derive patterns from them due to repeated counting. For example, I have found that while counting the sum of the license numbers of Nigerian plate numbers that every time the sum is a multiple of 3, I can juggle the numbers so that they can fall in ascending order. Imagine a plate number is LH855KJA, the sum of the numerals adds to eighteen (18), which is a multiple of three, so I can rearrange the numbers as 666, then take one from the leftmost number, six (6), and add to the last six to derive a number that falls in ascending order: 567. Quite some maverick practice, but it works when you find pleasure in counting and numbers.

Abacus, one of the earliest mechanical calculating devices

Counting and calculation has been as old as man itself. A short history of counting involves when we counted by recitation and with the fingers. A mechanical calculation device, the abacus, was thereafter invented to aid in faster counting and calculation.

William Oughtred, the inventor of the slide rule

A Scottish mathematician, John Napier developed logarithms in the sixteenth century. Logarithms made it possible that multiplication and division were converted to addition and subtraction respectively, thereby making counting and calculation of numbers more easy, especially for very large numbers. William Oughtred, an English Mathematician, built upon logarithms to invent the slide rule, a mechanical calculation device, for logarithms.

Calculators which are electro-mechanical devices successfully replaced the manual devices above and eventually, they have all been usurped by the computer. The beauty and sweat of man’s efforts to count and calculate efficiently is embodied in the computer. Thanks to the computer, the absolute impossible, for example, genotyping living beings, is possible. Every single gene in the human body can now be counted and understood.

So, even if all the green bottles fall off the wall, you and I will still be counting in some other way, either through an app on a mobile device or a computer game.

Talking about games, I intend doing research on games that can aid in numerical ability in the nearest future.




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