How Math Explains The World

The November Statement My first glimpse into mathematics, as opposed to arithmetic, came on a Saturday afternoon in late fall when I was about seven years old. I wanted to go out and toss a football around with my father. My father, however, had other ideas. For as long as I can remember, my father always kept a meticulous record of his monthly expenses on a large yellow sheet that, in retrospect, was a precursor of an Excel spreadsheet. One yellow sheet sufficed for each month; at the top, my father wrote the month and year, and the rest of the sheet was devoted to income and expenses.

On this particular fall day, the sheet had failed to balance by 36 cents, and my father wanted to find the discrepancy. I asked him how long it would take, and he said he didn’t think it would take too long, because errors that were divisible by 9 were usually the result of writing numbers down in the wrong order; writing 84 instead of 48; 844836. He said this always happened; whenever you wrote down a two-digit number, reversed the digits, and subtracted one from the other, the result was always divisible by 9.1 Seeing as I wasn’t going to be able to toss a football around for a while, I got a piece of paper and started checking my father’s statement.

Every number I tried worked; 72 2745, which was divisible by 9. After a while, my father found the error; or at least decided that maybe he should play football with me. But the idea that there were patterns in numbers took root in my mind; it was the first time that I realized there was more to arithmetic than the addition and multiplication tables.

Over the years, I have learned about mathematics and related subjects from four sources. In addition to my father, who was still attending Sunday-morning mathematics lectures when he was in his seventies, I was fortunate to have some excellent teachers in high school, college, and graduate school.

When the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957, schools scrambled desperately to prepare students for careers in science and engneering; the Advanced Placement courses took on added importance. I was in one of the first such courses, and took a wonderful course in calculus my senior year in high school from Dr. Henry Swain.