Mathemata Mathematicis Scribuntur
This was posted on the original Asnuma blog on July 10, 2016.
The second calculus defeat was tasted on a rainy Friday morning.
Perhaps it was my heavy backpack that kept me from descrying the harshness of the red ink on my paper, or perhaps it was that my mind wandered to my dwindling bank account, the Game of Thrones theme stuck in my head, the obnoxious nature of R Studio when it refuses to read my code. Perhaps it was simply a fixation on the beating of my own heart, my life outside of this classroom, that rendered the poor grade a moot point. It was raining, this mortal sphere was soaking, and I had failed. Again. It's just a flesh wound.
In truth, school has long been a burdensome pursuit for me, and I did not fathom even a few years ago that I would be so keen on going to graduate school. Yet my own experience with formal education is not the point of this post. Here and now, I wish to speak about the necessity of education -- not school, but education. There is an oft-cavernous gulf between the two, but let it be known: School is important. Education is everything.
Before going further, we must establish a definition of education that waltzes the soul in all the ways knowledge for knowledge's sake can. Education is the sensation of one's mind broadening beyond its previous borders. It is the realization that the song within is tuned to harmonize with life's music, tuned to contribute to the rhythm of the world, not echo and duplicate it. It is the realization that hope and despair are twin emotions when they accompany new knowledge. Education is not bald facts. Education is not dates and figures.
I have failed time and time again in my schooling in mathematics, though I long ago vowed to never fail in my education. To this end, I am saving up to try a new route -- an online calculus program from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This approach to mathematics takes advantage of my love of autodidact education, and I am excited to be able to afford the classes. Because I love data science, my education will never be complete. Because trigonometry and geometry speak to me in a language rigid with possibility, I will never fail in my education no matter how far I fall in my schooling. Because discrete mathematics marches to the beat of a tin drum that I play, I will always have a direction if not a passing grade.
The goal of this blog is to encourage education over schooling, wisdom over smarts, failure over success. I am not sagacious by any means, but the beauty of knowledge is that it is dynamic, ever filling, ever expanding. With mathematics in particular, the incredible beauty of numbers is that they are paradoxical: Simultaneously creative and logical, they clash internally. To engage with numbers is always to fight a civil war. Numbers and equations are only as good as their utility... except when they contribute to the logic of the universe simply by existing. Numbers and equations are used only in the sciences....except when one stops to realize that Dante's Inferno is highly mathematical. There is nowhere math cannot go. Math is essential to music, to the humanities, to the building of bridges, the engineering of vaccines.
My curiosity leads to me math's peculiar dance in the hall of cognitive science. Representational geometry, for instance, is used in brain networking and brain mapping. Using representational geometry, we can analyze the distance between neural populations (nodes) within the brain. My current interest lies in the application of representational geometry to neuroanatomical mental health research, particularly in mood and thought disorders. The graceful dance of mathematics appears everywhere existence itself appears.
To educate oneself is not to receive an A+ in Calculus I - it's to see this fact, this beauty of numbers, through the thick cloud of failure. Had I not failed on that rainy Friday morning, I would never have been so desperate to prove myself as a mathematician. Were I not so desperate to prove myself, I would never have had any reason to question the numbers that weave the world I inhabit. The goal from herein is to gain concrete skills -- in derivatives, in integration, in developing probabilistic models.
Strip away the language surrounding this post, bear in mind this: Pursue the things you fail; love the things you fail; fail again; fail better. Then go do mathematics.
