Seriously, though. The other night I was eating pretzels, and I pulled one out of the bag to find that it was broken in the shape of a curvy "E." I thought to myself, "That looks like the symbol for 'a member of the set of...' when determining domain and range of a function." What is this madness? I can't even escape it when I go for a snack!
There have been such an abundance of bombarding math analogies lately that I just had to share them with you all. Will you understand all of them? I hope so. The following three are my favorites.
- In calculus right now, we are talking about Riemann sums (which is used to find the area under the curve of a function on a graph---in case you wanted to know). In order to calculate the Riemann sum, you must first find delta x (which means "the change in x"). The other day, one of my math major friends told me a story about her and her first-time boyfriend. (For storytelling purposes, let's say that his name is Bryce and her name is Belinda). Belinda said to me, "The other night, Bryce kissed me, and my mind went off on this crazy tangent. I thought, 'Oh my goodness, how did we get to this point?' Then I thought, 'Well, to figure that out I would have to find delta x which is equal to b minus a all over n. But to figure that out, I would need to know a. I would also need to know b. Oh crap, I would have to know n, too! And there are no numbers in this equation, so it it impossible to solve it!'" (Her mind must have been going about a million miles an hour). Then she said, "I finally told myself, 'Belinda! A boy likes you. A boy is kissing you. A boy who likes you is kissing you. STOP THINKING ABOUT MATH!'" If that isn't a math major problem, I don't know what is.
- One of my friends has recently scored a date with a guy she has been crushing on for quite some time. Because of conflicting schedules and other circumstances, she is not able to have a date with him until sometime in January. Anyway, she has been fretting about this ordeal quite a bit lately and she asked me the other night, "Libbi, what do you think is going to happen? I mean, what if the date goes badly? On the other hand, what if it goes well?!" I said to her, "You never know what will happen. I mean, I personally feel good about the whole thing. It's probably going to be like an exponential function... you know, it starts off kind of slow, but then things just take off!" She laughed out loud and said, "Oh, Libbi. I love you. I hope you're right."
- I saved the best story for last. Recently I have started coming up with a song about integration that matches the tune of "Single Ladies" by Beyonce. Upon singing this song and coming up with other math "catch phrases" I have been rubbing off my quirkiness on my wonderful roommate. I said to her the other day, "One day you will come up with a math analogy, and it will be the best day of my life." Well, friends, today was that day. In order to understand the analogy, you need to have a little background information....
I started hanging out with this guy a while back, and we really like each other. There is a lot of pressure from our friends to make the relationship "official"... a common phrase he and I hear is "please define the relationship." This afternoon, I walked into my room and my roommate says to me, "Libbi. You and [insert boy's name here] just need to find the domain and range of your relationship." It made my whole day. My whole week. My whole month. The fact that she came up with the analogy and it is totally relevant and it makes sense is enough to make me sleep with a smile on my face for the rest of my life. :-D
No comments:
Post a Comment