I have a confession to make: I love math. I have loved math since the day I first learned what math was. I wish I could celebrate the day I learned distributive property as if it were my birthday and it not be weird. I always save my math homework for last so that I have something to look forward to. I’ve tutored math since high school, but not because I wanted to help people or make money. I just really wanted to do math problems all the time.
Sadly, my love for math is not shared by the majority of the population, as evidenced by the horrified faces I get when I tell people what my major is. It absolutely breaks my heart that math seems to cause people a great amount of pain, so today I will try to heal some mathematical wounds by sharing some of the coolest math things I’ve learned recently. Aside: The punctuation most befitting to express my excitement for the following involves at least three exclamation points per sentence, but unfortunately such style is not appropriate for a professional newspaper.
1. All life decays and eventually dies, but did you know that for most species you can predict how long an organism will live directly from its mass? The metabolic rate of a species is equal to its mass to the three-fourths power. This incredibly simple rule applies to most plants and animals; it even works for individual cells! Better not talk smack about your math class again. Math knows who will live and who will die.
2. A “fractal” is a mathematical shape that is self-similar, meaning that if you were to zoom in on a section of a fractal, that zoomed-in picture would look the same as the zoomed-out picture. There are many examples of fractals in nature: tree branching systems, heads of broccoli, some seashells, lightning, snowflakes, etc. But my favorite example is a cloud! Like other fractals, clouds have a fixed volume but an infinite surface area. The fixed volume is easy to understand because it is simply made up of all the water droplets that form the cloud. But infinite surface area is less intuitive. Clouds seem to have a given outer surface area, but really they contain huge volumes of air that spread the water droplets out on a macro-to microscopic scale. So really if you were a tiny organism trying to walk on the surface of a cloud, you would never stop walking! That is, until you die at the time determined by your mass.
3. Often it seems that ants move around in a random pattern, so how are they able to determine the amount of space they have to build a nest? One theory suggests that first they walk around the space randomly leaving a scent. Then the ant comes back later and does the same thing. The number of times the second scent crosses the first is inversely proportional to the area of the site! This mathematical concept could be innately programmed in their brains; I doubt that ants actually know how to count. Math is absolutely everywhere. It provides an explanation for some of life’s most complicated events, all within one organized system. Can you say that any other subject has such a deep insight into the truth of human experience? I don’t think so! Maybe you’ll scrunch your face a little less strongly next time you encounter another one of my kind.
—Lindsay Lee is a junior in mathematics. She can be reached at [email protected]
