Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel by Jason Padgett, Maureen Ann Seaberg Page B
Authors: Jason Padgett, Maureen Ann Seaberg
Ads: Link
value of pi was between 3 10/71 and 3 1/7 . The ancient Greeks didn’t use decimals, but his fractions were the equivalent of about 3.1408 and 3.1429, respectively—not too far off the figure we use today.
I had never been taught about Archimedes or this visual approach, but now that I had arrived at the realization independently, I wanted to run through the streets announcing my profound discovery. I wanted to tell everyone this was a great secret revealed. Suddenly an idea I’d known in school only as “that 3.14 number” took on a relevance it had never had for me in a textbook or lecture.
I raced home and began my research further into pi that very day. As I read academic papers and popular-science articles online, I started to feel that pi literally defined everything—not just the ratios in a circle, but all of creation. It pertained to so many naturally occurring spheres, from pebbles to planets. And in more complex mathematics, like calculus, it helped define slope. I thought about the spirals of my seashell and draining water and coffee swirls. My own pupils were circles. Where would we be without the invention of the wheel? Circles were everywhere I looked and they felt fundamental to existence.
I began trying to describe what I saw to the rare visitor or person who telephoned. I said things like “Have you ever seen those boats where you push the lever forward from stop to fast? Push that lever all the way up and think of it as an obtuse, greater-than-ninety-degree angle, say a hundred-and-seventy-nine-degree angle, a really large one. Move that lever back down to a right angle, then slowly bring it down to an acute, less-than-ninety-degree angle until you collapse it in on itself. Think that every click along that lever makes a certain triangle. And every triangle is defined by pi at a certain value.” While this visual helped me a great deal and seemed very on point, my audience remained confused.
I wished I could give everyone the eureka moment I had had that day with the car—a circle subdivided by glistening, illuminated triangles. But when I tried to describe my inspiration, people told me that it would have been just an arc of light or a halo or a reflection to them. I couldn’t believe it was so mundane to them when for me it was a peak experience. I searched for the words to best represent this. I would wave my hands in the air, tracing what I’d seen with a pointed finger. All I got in return were blank stares. I realized that things would never be the same for me—all my life I would see down deep into the structure of things while everyone I knew was still skating on the surface. It was as though I’d been fitted with some sort of microscopic, x-ray-vision contact lenses. I searched for the words to capture its beauty and, more than that, the truth I believed its structure represented, but I was stammering.
Finally, I picked up a pencil and tried to sketch it.
I had never been able to draw in the past, but I was now pretty adept. The pencil didn’t feel like a foreign object in my hand but an extension of me and my mind. I felt compelled to draw and did almost nothing else. I found I was better able to represent things on paper than I had been. The joke in my family until now had been that when we played Pictionary, my doodles were always the worst! For one round of the game in which I had to represent the god Zeus, my scratch marks were little more than a carrot shape for a mountain and a zigzag for a lightning bolt above it.
I was amazed by my sudden facility with a pencil. It was as though someone else were clutching my fist and guiding my hand. This was another ability I’d never had before, and I had to set the pencil down for a moment to take it all in. What really made it come together, however, was when, in a rare conversation during my continued self-imposed isolation, a friend suggested that I add a ruler and a compass to my toolbox. I began to draw forms very close to the
I had never been taught about Archimedes or this visual approach, but now that I had arrived at the realization independently, I wanted to run through the streets announcing my profound discovery. I wanted to tell everyone this was a great secret revealed. Suddenly an idea I’d known in school only as “that 3.14 number” took on a relevance it had never had for me in a textbook or lecture.
I raced home and began my research further into pi that very day. As I read academic papers and popular-science articles online, I started to feel that pi literally defined everything—not just the ratios in a circle, but all of creation. It pertained to so many naturally occurring spheres, from pebbles to planets. And in more complex mathematics, like calculus, it helped define slope. I thought about the spirals of my seashell and draining water and coffee swirls. My own pupils were circles. Where would we be without the invention of the wheel? Circles were everywhere I looked and they felt fundamental to existence.
I began trying to describe what I saw to the rare visitor or person who telephoned. I said things like “Have you ever seen those boats where you push the lever forward from stop to fast? Push that lever all the way up and think of it as an obtuse, greater-than-ninety-degree angle, say a hundred-and-seventy-nine-degree angle, a really large one. Move that lever back down to a right angle, then slowly bring it down to an acute, less-than-ninety-degree angle until you collapse it in on itself. Think that every click along that lever makes a certain triangle. And every triangle is defined by pi at a certain value.” While this visual helped me a great deal and seemed very on point, my audience remained confused.
I wished I could give everyone the eureka moment I had had that day with the car—a circle subdivided by glistening, illuminated triangles. But when I tried to describe my inspiration, people told me that it would have been just an arc of light or a halo or a reflection to them. I couldn’t believe it was so mundane to them when for me it was a peak experience. I searched for the words to best represent this. I would wave my hands in the air, tracing what I’d seen with a pointed finger. All I got in return were blank stares. I realized that things would never be the same for me—all my life I would see down deep into the structure of things while everyone I knew was still skating on the surface. It was as though I’d been fitted with some sort of microscopic, x-ray-vision contact lenses. I searched for the words to capture its beauty and, more than that, the truth I believed its structure represented, but I was stammering.
Finally, I picked up a pencil and tried to sketch it.
I had never been able to draw in the past, but I was now pretty adept. The pencil didn’t feel like a foreign object in my hand but an extension of me and my mind. I felt compelled to draw and did almost nothing else. I found I was better able to represent things on paper than I had been. The joke in my family until now had been that when we played Pictionary, my doodles were always the worst! For one round of the game in which I had to represent the god Zeus, my scratch marks were little more than a carrot shape for a mountain and a zigzag for a lightning bolt above it.
I was amazed by my sudden facility with a pencil. It was as though someone else were clutching my fist and guiding my hand. This was another ability I’d never had before, and I had to set the pencil down for a moment to take it all in. What really made it come together, however, was when, in a rare conversation during my continued self-imposed isolation, a friend suggested that I add a ruler and a compass to my toolbox. I began to draw forms very close to the
Similar Books
