It hasn't been just technical difficulties that have limited my blogification this last month. I am ashamed to admit that I have done hardly any mathematics in January. There are all sorts of excuses, but in the realm of Physicsworld, there is no excuse. Remember that Freeman Dyson and Murray Gell-Mann, as well as others, taught themselves calculus in less than a year when they were just teenagers. So what's wrong with me? Well, one of the reasons is my failure of nerve. After six years, I have lost some of the fervor that drove me to rush out of Fermilab and into the world of learning mathematics and physics. That wintry slowness tells me: What is the point of it? I will never be a scientist, never go through the twenty years' ordeal that it takes to really become a True Scientist, never struggle for the Ultimate Totally Admirable Goal of tenure at an academic institution, never really work at Fermilab. Why do I, a commercial artist specializing in architecture and vegetables, need to do any of this? It's not just for making pretty pictures with exponential or catenary curves in them.

As the anniversary of the third year of this Electron Blog approaches, what have I got to show for it? Am I launching rockets yet? No, but my friends gave me a lava lamp which reminds me of the processes of convection and cooling. Have I discovered new particles? No, but I like to read the articles on particles in New Scientist Magazine. Have I learned to unravel string theory? No, but I have good friends who blog about knitting and even knitting and calculus. So why is the Electron losing energy? Is there some unseen winter field slowing me down? Am I about to emit a photon and put on the brakes as I turn some graphic curve?

I can point to two main reasons why my calculus study is going so slow. The first is that I don't have a lot of personal contact with anyone who knows that I am doing this or can help if I get into perplexity. The closest of my Friendly Mathematicians are in Baltimore (an hour's drive away even in normal traffic), and they are so incredibly and legitimately busy in their lives that I am not able to reserve enough time with them. They want to help, but some of my questions are just not things that can be answered over the internet. My entire life, at least since I can remember it, consists of trying to find time to work on whatever with people whose lives are so full and overscheduled that I am hardly more than another demand on their time, in essence, a nuisance. I can remember with vivid fondness the few times when one or another of these people has sat with me for more than an hour or two, just helping me clear up the problems of various sorts that were hindering me. (Thanks, Electron readers…you know who you are.) "Don't bother them," has been my refrain, yet how could I learn something without that vital contact? As I've said before, I will not subject myself to the nightmare of a formal classroom again if I can help it. And tutors are very expensive. That is one reason for the slowdown.

Another reason is the material itself. I was OK with looking at graphs and finding where the limits were. I was even OK with figuring out where the limits were from the equations, and I'm trying to review that right now. And I could even crank out derivatives, either from a graph or algebraically or from one rule or another. But here's the mathematical obstacle. The book (Anton's calculus text) offers proofs of each derivative rule. I have tried to work through them, but the book doesn't give all the steps or explain what's going on. For mathematicians, proof is the essential criterion for legitimacy. If it isn't proved, it doesn't work. But I don't get these proofs. Without understanding and working through the proofs, I am not entitled to work with the derivative rules. And without the derivative rules, I can't go ahead and derive. That's why I am stuck on the learning curve. So I guess I'll emit these photons of synchrotron blog radiation and hope that I'll find some way to gain back the energy to continue on beam and on course.

Posted at 10:51 pm | link