Tuesday, October 24, 2006

The Mathematician's Lament

It's been a long time since I've written here, for no particular reason. I actually had a few quirky stories along the way that I wanted to write down, but they suffered from my fleeting memory for such things; I have a tendency to remember that I wanted to write a story but not what it was about. I know my mother did something quite funny a few months ago and I even asked permission from her to write it up (or, at least, I forewarned her, which is not exactly the same thing), but by the time I got back home, it was gone.

That's my long-winded way of saying not much has happened since I last wrote. Which is my very roundabout way of saying I'm getting a bit alarmed at how little I and mine accomplish.

I would describe my household as "low energy," in general. Everyone here sleeps late, even the dog. To-do lists in this household never get entirely checked off. My big accomplishment this fall was to seed the lawn: I actually hired someone to aerate, bought $350 worth of seed, put the seed down, watered the lawn somewhat faithfully, and have been rewarded with a crop of grass, which, frankly, astounds me. This is all very good and almost entirely out of character. But I also bought fertilizer, which I know I'm not supposed to put down too soon, but it's probably time, so I should do it, but: I can't. I can't do it because I own the fertilizer, it's in my garage, and I know all I have to do is put it on the lawn. A solution exists.

It's the age old mathematician's joke. The engineer goes to sleep and wakes up to a fire. Seeing a bucket by the bed, he springs into action, filling the bucket from the bathroom faucet and dousing the fire before it catches the drapes. In contrast, the mathematician awakens to the same scene, sees the bucket, says to himself, "Ah, a solution exists!" and promptly goes back to sleep.

I am an engineer by training, but I have the heart of a mathematician. I could list a countably infinite set of tasks I either intend or wish to accomplish, none of which I've made appreciable progress on because I am pretty sure I know how to go about them. They're intimidating, and I know that actually doing them would take a lot of time and effort and energy that I don't have, and so instead I occasionally ponder how I'd go about them while I'm sitting on the couch watching the tail end of a CSI I'm pretty sure I've seen before. Sometimes I'll go buy a whole bunch of supplies in preparation for a big job. Then I've really got the problem surrounded.

The best delicious irony in our household, though, is the fact that my boyfriend has gone back to college for an advanced degree in math. He is currently quite far behind on his assignments, and every time the panic rises enough to threaten to swamp his little boat of denial, he bails the boat dry by buying another reference book. He doesn't actually read the reference books. He doesn't actually write the program that goes with exercise A.2 or work the example problems that would help him pass his next exam. He just carries more and more reference books around, because, if he's near them, he knows that a solution exists. And I just keep thinking, really, what did they expect?

Does this mean that anyone who successfully earns a degree in mathematics is, by definition, not a true mathematician?