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I think I’m working out some of my own anger. I was very frustrated in college math classes, because they just wouldn’t tell you why this stuff was important. If you ever had Zeno’s dichotomy in a calc class and you saw the calc solution, you don’t walk away bathed in relief at the resolution to the paradox, because they strip all the interesting context away. [Zeno claimed that it’s impossible to walk across, say, a hotel room, because you would first have to walk halfway across, then halfway across the remaining quarter-length, etc., and there would always be some space left between you and the other side of the room.] If you’re just given “a over 1 minus r” in a math class, I’d say that’s semi-impoverished. OK, I can solve that, but I still don’t understand how I walked out of the room.
Approaching infinity (Boston.com) This is exactly why I hated math as a child, except for one, single problem in introductory algebra where my tutor made up a problem that ended with a negative-space back-yard pool.
