Dedicated to my Math Teachers.

World Mathematics day dedication

“Mama what’s upsetting you” asked my daughter Tee. She is so wonderful she knows the difference between when I am upset and when I am angry she will never mix up the two. She is one of those unique individuals who will tell you the difference between indigo-lavender-lilac and purple precisely.

“what makes you say I am upset”

“you are muttering nineteen tables, ” she replied with a straight face, I would have snorted if I did not have a cold.

“what,”  she looked up and told me, ”Whenever you are tidying the house you pick things in fives and replace them you count aloud. When you are upset you mutter nineteen tables. When you are doing meditative craft, you just count.”

Well that must be coming from being a math teachers daughter, My challenges with handling my mother and math is a pet peeve that I have often off-loaded on my blogspace — https://parwatisingari.wordpress.com/2013/06/11/waur-ah-tae-host-a-ceilidh/ .

Mom has this unique trait, when she is overwhelmed or she needs to sort things out she puts them  on paper, then works a matrix, sometimes she just puts it as equation. People make lists my mother makes sets/matrix. She gives directions in squareandthehypotenus method.

what I am trying to say is mathematics is not a boogie to be scared off, somewhere the schools teach us, for god’s sake 2 ½  is mixed number, but if you write it as 5/2 you have a improper fraction, and this lasts only until your 4^th grade, mathematics is paradoxical in the sense on one hand we have a absolute rule, and on the other hand we have an abstract theory.

Think about this, solving a problem for which we know there’s a solution is like climbing a mountain with a guide, along a trail someone else has laid. In mathematics the truth is somewhere out there in a place no one knows. Beyond all the beaten paths. And its not always at the top of the mountain it might be in a crack on the smoothest cliff of somewhere deep in the valley.

Mathematics expresses values that reflect the cosmos, including orderliness, balance harmony, logic and abstract beauty.  But the study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment.. we are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it. This what my high school Math teacher Mr.Dennis D’Silva used to declare  https://parwatisingari.wordpress.com/2010/12/22/to-the-mathemagician/

So we have a world mathematics day to authenticate our engagement with mathematics, we have live Mathletics forming the base for the participants to play 60 second games. Age appropriate mental math problems are given across the world and levels go on from level 1 to 10. Level one is simple addition while higher levels deal with Cartesian graphs and factorizing algebraic expressions.

While India honours its son Mathemagician Srinivasan Ramanujan by celebrating the National mathematics day on December 22^nd.

In my space however mathematics remains the language that means finding patterns and crafting beautiful and meaningful explainations.

world math day last year https://parwatisingari.wordpress.com/2015/03/04/world-math-day/