Excuse me…

Driving home the other day, I heard an advertisement on the radio, that said “Tired of taking a square root of an isosceles triangle?”

Are we diseased? Is it this hard to look up and say at least something that has meaning?..

Well, that said, the new movie, titled 21, has also quite irritated my already twisted convolutions of the brain. I first saw the trailer sitting in a movie theatre, which started by showing a young man, who is extremely good with simple arithmetics. And I thought “Oh, nice, good fella”. But then the voice over frame said that this young man “was the brightest and most successful mathematics student at [some] university”…

And not that that can’t be true (it of course can… it’s a movie anyway…), but the idea that “the greatest mathematician” is always associated with “he who counts fastest” just bugs bujizas out of me.

I know many very clever people who are not generally fluent with numbers. In fact, doctor Bar-Natan (~) is surely one of the most clever and bright people I know; he has “no experience in computation whatsoever”…

So… ?

What does it take to compute 1/3 + 1/2 – 2/3?

I don’t know about you, but for me it first took about 3 to 4 minutes of thinking, then another minute of thinking about how stupid I am, then it took calling out the Run window to type “calc” in order to call out the calculator, then ridiculously typing in all those fractions and realising that the answer I get is a weird long number and that I cannot figure out what it is as a simple fraction, and then finally pulling out my normal calculator from the bag and punching in those fractions to get a good answer as a fraction. This was followed by another half a minute to a minute of thinking that there might be something wrong with me… =\ hmmm…

I am so greatful that neither mathematics nor physics are really about numbers. They just pretend that they are. :)

Update: The answer is 1/6, by the way, for those who encounter similar difficulties. :)