I always hated the damnfool questions. “If a bath holds 100 gallons of water and the tap is 1” in diameter etc etc, how long will it take to fill the bath?”
In the history of mankind, who has ever needed to know how to solve that problem?
The answer is "not quite as long as it takes to do the thing you went off to do while waiting for the bath to fill".
I did a maths degree but I never really got a good grip on fluid dynamics - I remember utterly failing to calculate which way the water swirls when you pull the plug out of the bath. TBH I don't feel that I'm missing too much with that one.
Doncaster, South Yorkshire. Soil type: sandy, well-drained
I was good at maths but a complete idiot at music (and tone-deaf to boot). I suspect I would've "got" music theory, but the practicality (singing or playing an instrument) were a non-starter for me so I never progressed to the theory part at school.
Doncaster, South Yorkshire. Soil type: sandy, well-drained
I think that may well be true for musicians who read music @pansyface but not so much for those who play by ear? My late husband could reproduce almost any tune after one hearing but failed to grasp the principles of basic mathematics. Although he could intuitively calculate fuel load on an aircraft, maybe it's just practice?
"The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it." Sir Terry Pratchett
I was 'into' the Golden Ratio a few years back - how it appears in the dimensions of your face, in the human body..etc and used in art to give 'pleasing' structures. Then we were decorating and having that 'dado' (why do I always want to say dildo there? - like saying Sumo - in a clipped Japanese accent - Creme rather than Sudo Creme) split - and I spent ages trying to convince my wife that using the golden ratio would give a better feel to the split.
I also heard another simple anecdote of a famous mathematician at school when the class was given an exercise to calculate the number of bricks in a structure that had one brick in the first column, two in the second, three in the third etc and he put his hand up with the answer all but straight away as he'd visualised the problem - turned the wall upside down and reversed it and placed it on the base structure. A quick calc and he had the answer. So simple. But then some people can visualise things easily, and some can't conjure a mental image at all.
I was great at English and the Arts subjects (selective all girls grammar), ok at the rest with the exception of Maths ... I was totally flummoxed about numbers. I'd been to a tiny village school (13 children) and we older children sort of just worked through maths work sheets ... when I got to the grammar school it was as if the maths teachers were speaking another language ... it was as if everyone knew this magical stuff except me ... I floundered badly, not helped by Ma explaining to the head mistress that my difficulties with maths was due to my low forehead (Ma had been taught by some very odd nuns) ... I was not allowed to take my maths 'O' level as "it would be a waste of public money" according to the head mistress (she was a very odd and unpleasant woman). I sailed through all other 'O' levels with great grades, but was so desperately unhappy at school I left and went to secretarial college and .... again, top grades.
In my early twenties an acquaintance said he was really puzzled why I kept saying I was rubbish at maths etc, when I ran a business, and had taught myself to do the accounts, VAT and PAYE. He had done Higher Maths at Oxford and said, 'but maths is just logic ... and you're so incredibly logical' .... it was as if someone had torn down a curtain ... I did Mensa entrance application to reassure myself that I wasn't going to make a fool of myself, and then I did evening classes on maths at my children's high school and discovered it wasn't me ... it had been the appalling teaching at my school. One male teacher would sit next to me, put his hand on my knee and ask if the reason I was confused was because it was my 'time of the month?' I wasn't the only girl he said inappropriate things to, but that wasn't considered out of the way and we were told to 'ignore it' because he was the only teacher in the school with a maths degree ... thankfully he was only there for a year.
Later on I got two good Hons degrees ... everything depends on the quality of the teaching.
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
There was a phrase I hated from maths lectures "it is intuitively obvious" - it never was. I could get to the end point after a couple of pages of step by step working but all the natural mathematicians could do this in one mental leap.
There is a story of a Maths lecturer who wrote something on a blackboard and said "That's obvious...at least I think it's obvious!". He goes away and comes back ten minutes later and says "Yes, it is obvious!".
Music is numbers isn't it? Weren't JS Bach's compositions seen as mathematical in nature? Numbers are in everything - a scale is mathematical isn't it, as a scale is vibration.
And then the synesthete reacts to the vibrations in different ways - so some composers 'see' music as colour. The universe is number - vibration. Fascinating stuff.
The maths-music correlation is quite well accepted I think? I think it's the abstraction, especially in written form, understanding of pattern and interval, and so on. That said, neither of my kids is particularly good at maths... but probably better than they would be without music. Neither make any sense to me, even with my whole family trying to explain keys or harmonies in simple language it does not compute.
There's quite a lot of evidence that children learning an instrument generally 'do better' at school, and maths is important for that. Though of course there are all sorts of confounding factors there, such as class, parental involvement etc.
'If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.'
I had a maths teacher who would stop half way through an explanation and say : "You see!" A statement, not a question. What is blindingly obvious to the mathematically inclined is totally obscure to others who's brains are wired differently. I managed to explain the basic concept of fractions to my primary school aged daughter by tearing up sheets of A4. It took a couple of minutes. Why couldn't her teacher have managed a simple explanation like that?
I also heard another simple anecdote of a famous mathematician at school when the class was given an exercise to calculate the number of bricks in a structure that had one brick in the first column, two in the second, three in the third etc and he put his hand up with the answer all but straight away as he'd visualised the problem - turned the wall upside down and reversed it and placed it on the base structure. A quick calc and he had the answer. So simple. But then some people can visualise things easily, and some can't conjure a mental image at all.
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In my early twenties an acquaintance said he was really puzzled why I kept saying I was rubbish at maths etc, when I ran a business, and had taught myself to do the accounts, VAT and PAYE. He had done Higher Maths at Oxford and said, 'but maths is just logic ... and you're so incredibly logical' .... it was as if someone had torn down a curtain ... I did Mensa entrance application to reassure myself that I wasn't going to make a fool of myself, and then I did evening classes on maths at my children's high school and discovered it wasn't me ... it had been the appalling teaching at my school. One male teacher would sit next to me, put his hand on my knee and ask if the reason I was confused was because it was my 'time of the month?' I wasn't the only girl he said inappropriate things to, but that wasn't considered out of the way and we were told to 'ignore it' because he was the only teacher in the school with a maths degree ... thankfully he was only there for a year.
Later on I got two good Hons degrees ... everything depends on the quality of the teaching.
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
I think it's the abstraction, especially in written form, understanding of pattern and interval, and so on. That said, neither of my kids is particularly good at maths... but probably better than they would be without music. Neither make any sense to me, even with my whole family trying to explain keys or harmonies in simple language it does not compute.
There's quite a lot of evidence that children learning an instrument generally 'do better' at school, and maths is important for that. Though of course there are all sorts of confounding factors there, such as class, parental involvement etc.
I managed to explain the basic concept of fractions to my primary school aged daughter by tearing up sheets of A4. It took a couple of minutes. Why couldn't her teacher have managed a simple explanation like that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss#Anecdotes