learn calculus

I dunno. I was looking at my list o’ goals here just now—actually I was checking to see if any random strangers had cheered me on about anything, and this goal happened to catch my eye.

I totally can do this. I’m smart. I have this brilliant, fat book on my bookshelf, Jan Gullberg’s “Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers”, and a few years ago I began to work through it, and then got hung up when I got to the chapters that contained problems that it required a calculator to solve.

Anyway. I just now typed “scientific calculator” into Google (because the reason I stopped a couple of years ago, or at least the reason I gave myself, was that I didn’t have a calculator), and apparently in 2007 there are like a zillion online Javascript calculator apps available. And my computer is always on, so it’s as good as having a calculator calculator. And, hell, the summer is coming up. So, shit. What am I waiting for, besides the end of the semester.

Okay.

I’ve never been a math guy, though it seems to me that I did pretty well on my SATs back in the day. I also did okay in high school geometry, in large measure because I could connect the problems with actual things in the world—triangles, circles, you know. Stuff like that. But all that other stuff, I was like, “what is this even used for, besides tormenting high school students who’d rather be reading novels?”

I managed to avoid having to take any math classes when I was in college, which made me happy, and it wasn’t until several years after I graduated that I ran across the first explanation of mathematics that fired my interest, and made me regret my avoidance of the subject.

Somewhere along the way I’d inherited a bunch of old Robert Heinlein paperbacks, and I was reading them. There was this one moment in one of them, “Starman Jones” I think, where one of the passengers on an interstellar spaceliner is chatting up the ship’s navigator, and she asks him how hyperspace works. He explains it to her metaphorically—I think it’s the “if you fold a napkin, you can fit it into a matchbook, despite the fact that the surface area of the napkin is larger than that of its container” thing. The passenger asks him if that’s really how it works. The navigator says no, but that’s the only way to describe it using English. He then goes onto propose that mathematics is in fact a descriptive language for describing phenomena and qualities of the physical world that we have no words for.

That blew my mind. I was kind of like, “fuck, why didn’t any of my math teachers ever tell me that? I would have totally paid attention. I want to speak that language.” I still do. But how does one go about teaching oneself calculus and stuff, anyway? Sigh.