DS brought home some math homework, which is to ask me the question, "what is math?" and write at least four sentences about my response. In the interest of educating the teacher, the class, and generally blowing any available minds, does anyone have any favorite quotes or particularly pithy commentary on the subject that I might include?

Math is...

a way of precisely representing observations and making predictions about the world around us, in a language that can be understood by anyone, anywhere.

Some people see math as simple, but when i am involved it becomes complex.

Or, since we are past the first day of kindergarten and probably understand that 1 +1=2, we can skip ahead to page 372 of the Principica Mathematica and see how things get ineresting.

Maybe a joke?

What did pi say to the square root of negative two?

Get REAL!!


What did the square root of negative two say in return?

Be rational!





Or you could go for snark:

Did you mean this in a statistically significant sense? Or were you seeking a qualitative response?

Hi there Q T π ! What's your sine?

A smart alec response:
Since a question from math class is asking for the definition of a word and multiple sentences describing the definition received, I must intuit that math is a either a form of language study or some subset of journalism.

That response totally wins, btw.

Shouldn't it be the square root of the negative number?

yes. Which just goes to show that I don't translate visual information very well into text. Nor edit very well when working back into symbolic form, clearly.

LOL.

Go ask your maths teacher. He or she should know. :-)

That joke works better with the square root of negative one, not sqrt(-2), though, IMHO, so that each participant has (morally ;-) just one of the faults alluded to. Poor sqt(-2) has both, breaking the balance of the joke.

My offerings are paraphrasesof things that were told to me as a child, which still seem true:

Mathematics is the king of the arts and the queen of the sciences.

Maths is the art of being lazy - mathematicians are always on the look out for an easier way to work things out, and much of maths has been developed for this purpose.

Maths is fun!

Math is the secret language of the universe.

Math is joy!

Whatever you choose, I would translate my answer into binary.

1 reason i love math is bcause its 2 hrd to txt wthout all th3 numbers math gives us. B4 i had 2 lern 5pelling + 6rammer. 7 really didnt 83L13VE the letters were all that gr8 to talk with. Mr. Google says
a2+b2=c2, am i right?

Maths is endless fun!

How about?

Maths teaches us that there are 10 kinds of people in the world, those that understand binary and those that don't

To quote Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart: What is math? "I know it when I see it."

I don't have any good answer because this just gave me flashbacks to my freshman year algebra II class where we spent the first quarter on answering the question "What is 9?" The teacher rejected every answer the class could come up with. I never found out the answer that the teacher was looking for because I ended up transferring sections for the rest of the year.

“The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.”

Frank Lloyd Wright

He was so close yet so wrong. The mother art of course is math. Without math, we will have no architecture.

This made me smile.

Thanks, guys!

We went with the 10 people...binary one, the lazy people one, the secret language of the universe one, and a Heinlein quote from "Time Enough for Love" ("Anyone who can't cope with math is not fully human. At best, he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.").

Should give them something to think about, anyway. This is for 8th grade math, BTW.

Fun choices, the Heinlein quote reminded me of one of my favorite short stories.


"Nine times seven, thought Shuman with deep satisfaction, is sixty-three, and I don't need a computer to tell me so. The computer is in my own head. And it was amazing the feeling of power that gave him" - Isaac Asimov, "The Feeling of Power"