Review - Math and Mathic
Jan. 18th, 2005 02:26 pmToday I got up late due to having foolishly vowed to finish something at work and having worked a 15 hour day. Don't worry, I won't work much the rest of the week. And turned on the TV for breakfast.
There was an 'edutainment' type show, with a touch of James Bond spoof. The villain had conquered a pyramid, and set up a radio transmitter that made people say the opposite of what they meant. Math sent Mathic off to stop him, with some holograms of children immune to the ray. He got to the desert, where there were a lot of camels, and only one which knew the way to the pyramid. The villain wouldn't tell him which until he answered a series of 'odd one out' questions about quadrilaterals. This bothered me because:
(1) The arbitrary nature of the plot (I know teasing the hero with riddles is traditional, but this was rank stupidity even for for a villain) seem to emphasise that maths is about learning arbitrary facts useful only for arbitrary challenges, whcih is about as opposite of how I think as possible.
(2) The whole 'opposite of what you mean' promised a lot of logic-puzzle shenanigans, ("Are the answers to 'is the beam on' and 'is this the way' different?") which never materialised.
(3) There's more to spoof than changing a letter in a name. That *can* be funny, but it's a pun, so it needs some build up.[1]
OK, I'm being too hard on it. There just needs to be more good maths fiction[2]. And I'm nostalgic -- I'm sure at school we once watched this thing about a spaceship crew who had to understand fibbonacci numbers to operate a wormhole and get home. That was more like it :)
[1] One of the best was Sluggy Freelance's spoof of Harry Potter II. They didn't just have a big snake with a slightly different name, they had something else compeltely, that managed to turn three different people to choclate through apparent coincidences, making fun of what's actually a weak point in the original, why so many people got petrified when you'd expect them to die.
[2] How often does a mathmo get sucked into a strange world? I can think of one book that made the point that he was actually, surprisingly, fairly well off as he was *used* to stipulating physics and stipulating different physics wasn't really and different. But it wasn't that good, and I can't remember the title. Otherwise? Stephenson's Cryptonomicon's Waterhouse is pretty good as a mathmo hero :) Anything else?
There was an 'edutainment' type show, with a touch of James Bond spoof. The villain had conquered a pyramid, and set up a radio transmitter that made people say the opposite of what they meant. Math sent Mathic off to stop him, with some holograms of children immune to the ray. He got to the desert, where there were a lot of camels, and only one which knew the way to the pyramid. The villain wouldn't tell him which until he answered a series of 'odd one out' questions about quadrilaterals. This bothered me because:
(1) The arbitrary nature of the plot (I know teasing the hero with riddles is traditional, but this was rank stupidity even for for a villain) seem to emphasise that maths is about learning arbitrary facts useful only for arbitrary challenges, whcih is about as opposite of how I think as possible.
(2) The whole 'opposite of what you mean' promised a lot of logic-puzzle shenanigans, ("Are the answers to 'is the beam on' and 'is this the way' different?") which never materialised.
(3) There's more to spoof than changing a letter in a name. That *can* be funny, but it's a pun, so it needs some build up.[1]
OK, I'm being too hard on it. There just needs to be more good maths fiction[2]. And I'm nostalgic -- I'm sure at school we once watched this thing about a spaceship crew who had to understand fibbonacci numbers to operate a wormhole and get home. That was more like it :)
[1] One of the best was Sluggy Freelance's spoof of Harry Potter II. They didn't just have a big snake with a slightly different name, they had something else compeltely, that managed to turn three different people to choclate through apparent coincidences, making fun of what's actually a weak point in the original, why so many people got petrified when you'd expect them to die.
[2] How often does a mathmo get sucked into a strange world? I can think of one book that made the point that he was actually, surprisingly, fairly well off as he was *used* to stipulating physics and stipulating different physics wasn't really and different. But it wasn't that good, and I can't remember the title. Otherwise? Stephenson's Cryptonomicon's Waterhouse is pretty good as a mathmo hero :) Anything else?