And Then A Little Maths….

You may remember back in 2007 I discovered mathematics doesn’t work. You don’t remember?  Okay, I’ll let you off as I had to use mathematics again the other day and forgot I’d been there before and whatever the answer, it’d be no good.

All this got me thinking of maths again; how rubbish I am at it but at the same time, how fascinating the subject is. This, in turn, got me wondering what progress had been made with Lie Groups and E8 and from there to musing on the wonders of Pi. After not too long a muse, I settled on the steak and kidney and had lunch.

While eating, and still contemplating maths, something in the nether regions of my memory banks pointed me towards an old, old mathematics story.

After a lengthy dig about on drive Y I found him! I’m sorry to say I can’t offer any attributes as it’s been sitting on that old drive since the dawn of DOS.

Oh, and while you read, and to follow on from yesterday, here’s my favourite Robert Cray number. {Sorry. I can’t get a Vevo videos to play full screen. Yet.} Enjoy the old story;

   There was an Indian Chief who he had three squaws. He kept them in three seperate teepees. On occasion, when he came home late from hunting, he wouldn’t know which squaw was in which teepee since it was dark.
   He went hunting one day, and killed a hippopotamus, a bear, and a buffalo. He put the hide from each animal into a different teepee, so that when he came home late, he could feel inside the teepee and he would know which squaw was inside.
   Well, after about a year, all three squaws had children. The squaw on the bear had a baby boy, the squaw on the buffalo hide had a baby girl. But the squaw on the hippopotamus had a girl and a boy. So what’s the moral of the story?
   The squaw on the hippopotamus hide is equal to the sum of the squaws on the other two hides.

I can almost hear the ‘whoosh’ as that one passes waaaay over the heads of anyone under the age of about fifty……

Quote;  Jarod Kintz.

“The only reason I don’t know more about love is because there just isn’t more to know. In fact, I’ve reduced love to a mathematical formula: Hdgk(X)=H2k(X,Q)∩Hk,k(X).
Actually, that’s not right. That’s the statement piece of the Hodge conjecture, but I’m sure you already knew that. ”