Tag: math

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Independence Day: Jefferson’s Debt to Euclid

Everybody’s busy reading the Declaration of Independence today. NPR talked to some people on the National Mall about it and what it means, with this sweet result.

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Interesting (and little-known) fact about the Declaration. Jefferson (and his fellow founders) were influenced by Euclid’s Elements, the collection of mathematical knowledge from 300 BCE, which, among other things, lays out the idea of reasoning from postulates. (Anybody recall 10th grade geometry, with its definitions, postulates, theorems, proofs, etc.? I, of course, loved every minute of it.) Jefferson, like students before and since, studied Euclid, and historians have picked up on how the Declaration is structured like a proof, (or as it would be termed in the Elements, a construction).

The “postulates” are those famous “Self-Evident Truths.” Once those are stated, assertions with justification follow in a long line, and everything is wrapped up by a rousing conclusion, Q.E.D.

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Pages from a Venetian edition of Euclid’s Elements. You can view the text at the Digital Collections of the Munich State Library.
More background and details via an interesting article at Lablit (itself an interesting site about science and literature). Oceanographer Seelye Martin talks about the Jefferson Euclid connection, and also about whether another bit of towering American rhetoric, The Gettysburg Address of 1863, could reflect the development of non-Euclidean geometry in the intervening years.
Happy 4th!

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Funny Words

Having nothing to offer this political day, I share this math joke courtesy of Jim. Makes me long for Boston, where this would not be uncommon at all.

“Two mathematicians, Joe and Bob, are in a restaurant. Joe is talking about how he feels that math education has really improved in his lifetime.

Bob is a grumpy old man. He disagrees. Strongly.

Joe says, “You know, I bet the average person on the street even knows a little calculus.” Bob laughs.

Bob goes to the bathroom. While he’s gone, Joe calls their waitress over and tells her: “Listen, I’m going to ask you to come over here in about five minutes. When you do, I’ll ask you a question. I want you to answer “One-third x cubed.” If you do, I’ll leave an extra $5 in the tip.”

The waitress blinks at him. “One thir-dex cue?”

“Sure, close enough.”

Bob comes back from the bathroom and Joe says, “Look, I’ll bet our waitress knows the integral of x squared.”

Bob scoffs. Joe bets him $10.

They call the waitress over and Joe asks her the integral of x squared. As instructed, she answers “One third x cubed”.

And as she’s walking away, she calls back over her shoulder, “plus a constant.”

Via the The The Listserve email lottery.