The year was 1958. Elvis was the King, "At the Hop" by Danny and the Juniors was the year's number 1 song, colorful geometric forms dominated graphic design as well as pop architecture, and "Gigi" won the Oscar for Best Picture. I was five years old, and was not a mathematical child. I was fascinated by volcanoes, lived in a fantasy world of my own, and was obsessed with superheroes. Nothing much has changed with me, except the math.

It was the height of the Cold War. The "Eastern Bloc" Communists, and the Soviets, were threatening. In the world of science and space, momentous things were happening. In the fall of 1957, the Soviets launched the first artificial Earth satellite, Sputnik I. It set off a panic in the United States as the Americans realized that they were in danger of losing the Space Race. In January of 1958, a year which was designated as the "International Geophysical Year," America launched its first satellite into space, "Explorer I." 1958 was the year that NASA was established, as America's answer to the Russian space challenge. Now the race was truly on.

America needed scientists, all types of them, to combat the Communist threat and win the Cold War not only on the earth but in space. America especially needed space scientists, who could design rockets and missiles and satellites and spy gear and all the things we would need in this new world. Astronauts and manned spaceflight were still a few years in the future. The heroes would be the men who could fight the Commies with science.

The image of the scientist, still powerful even now, comes from the fifties: a man (always a man) in a white short-sleeved shirt (or even that white lab coat) with the archetypal pens and pencils and plastic pocket protector, with ill-fitting black pants, white socks and black shoes, hair cut short and thick glasses. Despite decades of hip scientists trying to defy the image, Nerdman is still around. In 1958 he had a slide rule; now he has all sorts of computer, wireless, and virtual-reality gadgets to add to his arsenal. America still needs nerds!

My College Algebra book is dated 1958. When it was time for me to go seriously into algebra, back in 2001 (2001! THE FUTURE!) I went to my friendly local used bookstore and rooted in the dusty stack of math books. This one was small, compact, and best of all, it cost $5. A modern, current college algebra text, complete with CD and animated website, runs almost $100. I did the math, took "College Algebra" home, and gave it a dusting.

COLLEGE ALGEBRA, Fourth Edition, was published by Ginn and Company, and was authored by Joseph Rosenbach and Edwin A. Whitman, as well as Bruce E. Meserve and Philip M. Whitman (a relative of Edwin, perhaps?), all professors at Mid-Atlantic area universities. Meserve and Rosenbach were already known as mathematics textbook writers; my superficial research reveals nothing about the Whitmans.

The book is no bigger than a current trade hardcover, smaller than the big modern math textbooks and much easier to carry around in a bookbag. Unlike the slick graphics and bright colors of modern books, COLLEGE ALGEBRA's cover design is a dull tan, with a teal-blue spine and the title in white printed on a red rectangle. Whatever dust jacket it may have had is long gone. Also printed on its cover, in red, (as part of the original graphics) is a mysterious code number, "E 425," which has intrigued me ever since I got the book. What does "E 425" mean? Was it a course number? A library code? A signal to whomever used the book that he was at a certain level of study? I may never know.

The interior printing is small, only in black with no other colors, and occasionally poorly registered so that some numbers or letters are incomplete. This sometimes confused me, as I didn't quite realize that for instance, this "6" might really be part of an "8." There are very few typos in the book, which suggests a high level of proofreading, or perhaps just better math literacy in that antediluvian world.

The book begins with "Fundamental Operations" and goes through factoring, exponents, functions and graphs, equations linear and quadratic, systems of equations, inequalities, complex numbers, determinants, progressions, and more. This book was with me all through 2001 and 2002 as I struggled my way through college algebra without a college.

Working with this book is like going into a time warp. You might think that math is timeless, and it is, but the way it's presented is not, and it's influenced by its era. While pop culture was frivolous and flamboyant, college algebra (at least for the dedicated ones) was the realm of the slide rule men who didn't have a flamboyant thought in their crew-cut heads. The word problems reveal the world of the college algebra student of 1958: baseball statistics, exam grades, basketball players' heights and scores, airplanes and aircraft carriers, bullets and targets, and farmers plowing areas of land. The time warp really kicks in for questions like these: "Paul Jones won $64,000 in a TV contest, put aside $28,000 for taxes on this income, and split the balance with his consultant…." And then: "An office boy went to the post office and bought 425 (is that "E425?) stamps, some 2-cent, and some 3-cent…" Poor office boy, now he is in his 60s and he is buying stamps for 37 cents, if he's buying them at all! To give even more historical math perspective, the Ginn text cites some problems taken from ancient Greek and Egyptian math texts. Now that's really a time warp.

This book, in its sober determination to make engineers out of college boys, matches my own retro, second-youth determination. It also works the way I do, step by step, methodically, setting out rules and proofs and offering scads of problems, each one increasing in difficulty and complexity. Like many math books even today, it only offers answers for the odd-numbered problems, leaving me to do the even-numbered ones in mystery and suspense. An introduction at the beginning of the book states that a separate pamphlet with all of the answers was available for the teacher, but any copies of that have disappeared into the vast Cartesian plane of history. I would be fascinated to see whether any of them still exist.

Chapter 15, the chapter on Logarithms, begins on page 369. (Not page 425, which contains problems in the "Probability and Combinations" section.) The introduction reads:
"Historically, the importance of logarithms has lain primarily in their usefulness in computation. With the growth of computing machines, the value of logarithms for computation has decreased, though it still remains substantial because of the cost and complexity of machines.…"

It will be quite a while before I get to the more complex logarithmic material and the transcendental number e. This is all new to me, even though I vaguely remember something about logarithms in high school. The more problems I solve, the better. I am proceeding with interest (perhaps even compound interest) through these pages and am currently doing problems in the second subsection, about multiplying and dividing logarithms.

I have two other algebra books with logarithm sections at my disposal. One is a college text, unpretentious and in good condition, from the comparatively recent future of 1994. The other is another one of those Barron's study aid texts, and features the same Ruritanian fantasy setting (oh no!) that my "Trigonometry Made Difficult" text had. I don't know whether I can stand a return to Ruritania, but perhaps the exponential excitement will carry me through. Right now I prefer to work in 1958.

Three cicada cycles old

Today, June 25, is my birthday. My life so far has encompassed exactly three cycles of the periodical cicada Magicicada septendecim, or four cicada emergences. A little math will tell you how old I am. I had no experience of the first two, since I grew up in a place which did not have these creatures, and the first would have been just before I was born anyway. I just missed experiencing the next to last, in 1987, since I visited a cicada area a week or two before the grand emergence. I have been privileged, if that is the word, to live through a full manifestation of the phenomenon this year. Now the cicadas are all gone, and the trees are silent. I miss my noisy little friends, but maybe not too much. Soon the trees will again be full of noise, not only with summer katydids and crickets but with the "ordinary" annual cicadas, who are the classic soundsters of summer to me. The eggs of the periodic cicadas will hatch soon and their progeny will burrow into the earth, to grow underground for the next 17 years. They will contemplate prime numbers in their hidden lairs, during the long years ahead. Time, for mathematicians and physicists and cicadas, moves in cycles described by my other new friends, sines and cosines and their kin. If I am lucky, I will be around in 2021 to meet the myriad again. 2004 will seem, by then, as quaint as 1958 seems now. But it will still be a long prime time before I see this again.

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