Movies with math scenes. A few of these are a bit of a stretch (Jurassic Park, come on), but there are some gems as well. (via MeFi)
Category Archives: Math
Math Structures
In the past week or so, math has gone from the class that I spent the least amount of time on to the class that I’ve spent the most. Things were going along pretty smoothly until we hit the chapter on cardinality (the size of a set), and then things got dramatically more challenging. The proofs have gotten a lot more complicated, and in general things are a lot more abstract. In the previous sections there were a few essential processes to learn that could be applied to pretty much all the problems, but this new stuff requires a lot more creativity.
That said, set theory has also gotten pretty interesting. It really forces you to redefine your understanding of mathematical ideas. For instance, it was sort of interesting to learn that there are the same number of elements in the integer plane as there are on the number line – even though a plane can be thought of as an infinite number of number lines. The real numbers get even weirder. It turns out that there are as many numbers in the interval (0,1) as there are in the entire set of real numbers, but that there more subsets of the set of real numbers than there are real numbers themselves. These sets are all infinite, but they’re not all the same size!
Anyway, excuse the ramblings, I’ve got a take home test to do this weekend, so I’ve got math on the brain.
Summer Classes
I just registered for Differential Equations and Contemporary Moral Problems at UNO over the summer. Not exactly the most thrilling plans, but it should keep me busy after I get back from WWDC. Nothing like a little math in the morning to spice up the summer. Or something.