THE GEEK IN THE MATHS FUNNEL

"I work downstairs," I said happily, rubbing my gloves together in the ice cold air.

"Ah," she said. "I used to work with people like you in my last job."

I must have raised an eyebrow. We walked a little further before she added:

"...geeks, I think we used to call them."

Oh.

I had another conversation later with one of the students. It started because he told me he had to write what he called a 'reflective essay'.

I jokingly asked if it was an essay on Snell's Law, then immediately remembered that he probably didn't know what that was.*

That's how it started - me being neither funny nor clever but looking like I had been aiming for both.

I carried on though, explaining my theory that all science subjects get you to philosophy if you talk about them enough and you're willing to go through the maths funnel.

Oh the maths funnel. It's like the scary boat ride in Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. What I mean is, eventually, the deeper you go - social science, chemistry, marine biology, atomic physics... the more your language of description stops being English and starts being pure maths.

This is the maths funnel. Equations pin everything down, algebra tells you the story of how things are working on a microscopic level - it all turns into letters, symbols and operators. It's a crazy but beautifully precise world.

It was about then that I remembered the incredible symmetry of Maxwell's Equations.

You should see them. These are four equations which dictate exactly how light propagates through space - the intertwined electrical and magnetic fields which wobble and dance around each other. The incredible thing about them is that they're exquisitely symmetrical.

Imagine finding four separate equations which completely describe a thing you can observe... which are almost mirror images of each other. It's like finding the brush strokes of the creator in the middle of the maths funnel.

I resisted going on about Maxwell's Equations.

Whichever your angle of approach to the maths funnel, you always end up the other side of it, in the world of philosophy. It's just a kind of mathematical output. For example, is zero an odd or even number? Could you prove it either way? What's the square root of -1? Do imaginary numbers really exist? Do negative numbers exist, while we're at it? What is existing?

"There's no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going... There's no knowing where we're rowing or which way the river's flowing..."

"I've never really thought of it like that before," said the student, clearly humouring me. He went on to argue that an excellent engineer would find a way to build a pyramid upside down (which I think might have been a bit of a dig at the way we build our software, actually) and I disagreed.

"You can't really get around the fact that physics forces you the right way up," I said, slipping around in Philosophy World. I'm pretty sure that engineers find solutions presented to them in the conditions of the real world, rather than deliberately trying to oppose them.

Before long, my head was flicking through possible ways that engineers might think - are they realistic artists? Or are artists engineers who just aren't limited by the constraints of a three dimensional world and just build... whatever they want? Which would I rather be? Actually, what am I? The ice is thin this side of the maths funnel and I felt safer inside it.

I would say that though, wouldn't I? I'm clearly a bit of a geek.



*Why would he? Why would anyone? If you're interested, it says that the angle of incidence of light hitting a surface (like a mirror for example) is the same as the angle of reflection. Oh the humour.