Pyracantha to logarithm tables: I give up. Despite an hour-and-a-half long phone conversation with one of my Friendly Mathematicians, in which he with infinite patience led me through one of those fractional-exponent evaluation problems, I simply cannot do one right. I follow the process. I search and interpolate. I divide, multiply, and reciprocate. I find the antilogarithm. I compute the results. Still wrong. I simply cannot stop making simple computation and arithmetic mistakes, even if I correctly follow the logarithm-negative-positive-reciprocal-antilogarithm process. Somewhere in all that hand calculation (no electronic means used) I make a mistake; one decimal point off, one number wrong, and then the whole thing is off. Or I fail to reverse one negative-positive logarithm number. Something always goes wrong.

I could try again, and again, and again, and again, and I still wouldn't get them right, even if I did a hundred of them. It's pathetic not only that I can't do them, but that I've tried so hard and done so many, still hoping to finally get it right.

This is what math for me in middle and high school was like. Endless, meaningless numbers, in complicated processes I hardly understood, trying to get things right and failing over and over again, exhausted and filled with shame.

I finally asked the Friendly Mathematician: How important for my future nonexistent physics career is it to correctly compute these things using only tables and working the math out by hand? "We do all these things with calculators and computers now," he answered."Other than understanding how logarithms arise and how they have been used to do computation, it's irrelevant and obsolete."

I tried to imagine a young boy, already immersed in math with the hope of going on to a career in physics or engineering. Would he be doing all this work? "No, he would have already finished his homework using the calculator and would be playing a video game."
I don't have that option. Ladies of a Certain Age do not play video games. But I do have a calculator. This logarithm game has been enough for me. I did not pass 1958. I will not help defeat the Commies with my scientific expertise. But I have to remember it's 2004 now. Time to proceed to exponential equations. Logging out for now.

Posted at 2:52 am | link