007. Exploration: Or how each book contains a whole new world

The task we had on our plate was to explore and have an overview about the different books we had ordered for our first semester. My books haven’t arrived yet at that time so I worked with my group (Grace & Carmen) who kindly lend me their books. Bert told us that just by looking at the books you can learn a lot and actually I believed it was really hard to get any real info doing it. . But once I tried I discovered that it was true! I loved the experience of exploring books, get in touch with them or as with the Story of Art revisiting them with fresh eyes. Actually with that book (that I recommended and was included) I felt like meeting with an old friend. Really interesting, have you tried? Well after this we start making a Prezi presentation to make it visible and to make connections. But this proved to be hard task since we weren’t used to plan and communicate we did double work or actually didn’t addressed our goal. We debrief the activity and some of us expressed our frustration with the platform used. (Dear Prezi if you are reading this: I honestly  love you... but why? WHY? you don’t cooperate when we are 2 or more working at the same  time!!!)

Taming the Infinite

We start reading the book Taminig the Infinite to be prepared for our first Math class. The book proved to be amazing. I love math but I also hate the way is usually teached. I’m not (yet) a robot thinking mind so the way Ian Stewart explain the Story of Numbers is amazing. I’ve been proved that I can perform better when I have some explanation about what I am doing and this book will help me to perform better in Math.

Math Class with Kyle

Well After the first reading on Taming the Infinite we had a dialogue on What is a number? What is math? Why are we doing this? And it became one of the most profound dialogues we had since we explored from the philosophy of those questions, to math involved in our usual world. I discovered that a number and math even when often presented together are fairly different. The firsts are symbols to express reality and the second is the relation that exist among different things expressed in different terms being the most usual math. And I keep from this conversation the question: Are numbers and math relations that our mind tries to impress in reality? or Are they realities that exist independently of us and we just discover them? For now I would choose the secound... but ahhhh I still don’t know for sure. Do you?

After the Dialogue we had Kyle’s introduction to Math. Ohhh what an amazing experience was this. We were confronted with Gauss problem how to sum all numbers from 1 to a 1000 in a rapid and efficient way. Well Alejo worked in one answer that result to be Gausse’s answer and it was made thru meticulous analysis. I arrived to a different but yet working solution that surprised Kyle. He dismissed at the first time, so do I. But Javier Tabush keep trying my formula and he announced me that it worked. We did it on the board and all were intrigued about the apparent difference. But Diego was the one who clarified the apparent difference... mine resulted to be a more complex (and in math simpler is better) form from Gauss. I got to this by trying and error and also by hunch. So we discovered that sometimes you can make a cold analysis and others it will come to you. hehehehe Well as Kyle says if it looks like a duck and it walks like a duck its a duck.