A Mathematician Is Grateful For…
Twelve Thanksgiving thank-yous from a mathematician: Big O notation for hiding bad arithmetic, philosophy for making pure math look useful, coffee, pie, axioms, peer review and more.
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Cartoon by Ben Orlin, Math with Bad Drawings. https://cartoons.mathwithbaddrawings.com/2017-11-15-a-mathematician-is-grateful-for/ (CC BY-NC 4.0)Transcript
[1] Grateful for Big O notation, for disguising my incompetence with arithmetic. 'What's 19 × 7?' 'Easy! O(1).'
[2] Grateful to philosophy, for making pure math seem useful by comparison.
[3] Grateful to logical paradoxes, for giving me nothing whatsoever to be grateful for.
[4] Grateful for coffee, for obvious reasons: 'O life-giving liquid! Give us this day our daily theorem.'
[5] Grateful for π's high cultural profile, for giving me frequent excuses to eat pie.
[6] Grateful for axioms, and I will not explain why. 'Hey, you get it or you don't.'
[7] Grateful for paperweights and doorstops, for serving the same function as textbooks at a fraction of the price.
[8] Grateful for baseball statistics, for making it so I don't need to watch baseball.
[9] Grateful for numbers so large they let me glimpse the cosmos. 'Like a googol?' 'No, I'm an analyst. I mean like 5 and 7.'
[10] Grateful for peer review, for reminding me to slow down: a 2003 paper just got its referee report.
[11] Grateful for math's reputation as 'smart people stuff', for providing cover: 'Isn't that a PULL door?' 'In Euclidean space, maybe.'
[12] Grateful for the defects of physical reality, which highlight the superiority of mathematical reality: a lumpy physical 'square' vs. a perfect mathematical square.