The derivative problem list, as do all math problem lists, gets a bit more complicated with each successive one. And when deriving ratios of f(x)/g(x), you have to use the "quotient rule," which is a piece of multi-layered machinery. This is one of those algebraic things which involve calculations within calculations. As with my polynomials many years ago, as long as I keep track of things and keep my negative and positive signs in the right directions, I'll be fine. I solved one like that tonight. I don't know whether I will go through them all. It's been a long time since I learned something new in math and I need to move ahead.

My view of ScienceWorld has changed a lot since my starry-eyed introduction to physics. Scientists are still my heroes but I was dismayed to find that many of them are mired in the same miserable, hypercompetitive, alcoholic academic life that I left decades ago. Whatever I have failed to do in my life, and my failures are many, at least I have not had to worry about getting tenure. I have not spent precious time desperately trying to get grant money from a perpetually diminishing funding source. Nor have I had to marry into the caste as so many lady physicists do.

I wish that ScienceWorld were more like the old TV cartoon program The Jetsons which I and millions of other Baby Boomers watched in our enchanted early 60s childhood. I imagine dedicated, hard-driving scientists with silver hair, dressed in bright spandex garments with puffy shoulder trim, riding around their levitating laboratories on flying Vespa scooters. Theorists could ponder their mathematical mysteries while sitting under clear floating skydomes in the clouds. Or even better, I envision a "Legion of Super-Scientists" along the lines of the DC Comics team The Legion of Super-Heroes where colorfully costumed young aspirants could prove their worth with fantastic deeds and amazing inventions. Both of these fantasies take place in an optimistic, cheerful future which is, ironically, obsolete. But I digress.

I must admit that the negative portrayal of the scientist's life in blogs and books I have read over the years has made me less enthusiastic, or perhaps more exactly, less intense about learning my mathematics and physics. In my life, I have focused on various sorts of people, learning about their lives, with the possibility of joining their world and their career: diplomats, librarians, nuns, archaeologists, architects, scientists. In the end I am left with the world and the people I know the best: artists. Better the caste I was born into, than the caste I would have to struggle to join. My art may be "derivative," but at least I can do derivatives without distress.

Posted at 2:50 am | link