Sexy Mathematics was my Valentine's

Yup! Mathematics is sexy

Mathematics and Music, an ideal connected pair. Both mind boggling. Both my loves ; and

Mathematics might just be equal approximately very very close to Architecture

So much for staying up till 4 am yesterday finishing up my Geometry past years', I automatically woke up at 6.45. So proud of myself! I woke up FRESH, MOTIVATED and SO WIDE AWAKE! So I figured, it's a sign, a sign that I should take this advantage to study and revise. So I decided to stay home today just finishing up my Geometry paper works prior to my exam next week and start on my reading on Actuarial surveys for my courseworks... and in between juggling those numbers, I managed to take breaks in between and bake a batch of Vanilla and Strawberry cupcakes and another batch of Double Chocolate Chip cupcakes, both topped with cream cheese! Yummyliciously therapeutic. I've been baking quite often lately. Such a stress relief. Best! :) 

Anyway, yes, I've been seeing so many numbers lately, I can vomit equations and theorems soon. I mean, my countless encounters with numbers have made me go number crazy, everytime working my brain to crunch those numbers and so willingly would I sit and spend precious time trying to solve equations and problems. I do enjoy that feeling of pure satisfaction that you get when you are able to solve a difficult question. It's just, high. Optimal! It's at that utility maximization point at the peak. Numbers numbers numbers. 

Yes I am doing a Maths degree, and never have I regretted it one bit. Ever. Thanks to Mama and Daddy, Aunty Esah, Shura and Uncle Shukor for making me see this. I love numbers and I'd spend a lot of time, just to solve those number questions. It's as if there exist no diminishing marginal utility theory when it comes to juggling jumbled up numbers. To me, it's like a big messed up puzzle that you need to rearrange to get a solution and so I think Mathematics is SEXY. Sexy in it's own kind of way :) 

Have you ever wondered what's so special about an A4 piece of paper? The proportions.

Fold it in half, and WALA! You get an A5 size. The resulting proportions are precisely the same.

Then, there exist cubes, squares and rectangles, where the sides are in perfect ; Whole number ratios to each other. It's like frozen music ( Music, another love of my life ), because it captures exactly the proportions that Pythagoras recognised as producing combinations of  of notes that sounded harmonious to the ears. 

Take a rectangle for example. Dulu in school we always had to do those "0.5 multiplied by base times height". Ingat tak? Ingat tak? hahaha! Take one which has it's long side twice the length of the short one and if you cut two pieces of strings to the lengths as the two dimensions of the shape, and then now hold them under the same ketegangan ( tension ). You guitarist (or musically inclined, music crazy people) , would discover that, when these strings are plucked, it would give notes that produce a perfect octave apart. Amazing isn't it? Now if you were to do the same on a rectangle whose sides have a 2:3 ratio, you will hear a perfect fifth.

( No, I never did finish my music grades. I only managed till Grade 7 before I gave up completely. Wasted that I never completed till Grade 8, but I think I preferred being tortured and abused being a gymnast. At least it was a torture I enjoyed rather than being asked to sit and practice my pieces. hehe...Sorry PaMa, tak dapat jadi your dream music-prodigy-child ).

Zaha Hadid. I'm sure it rings some bells. Well especially if it is a name so famously mentioned by ALL architecture students. The notable British Iraqi deconstructivist Architect with a first degree in Mathematics, she was trained as a Mathematician in Iraq and afterwards captured this connection in the piece she built for the 2008 Venice Biennnale. She connected the shapes of the waves produced by these harmonic notes as an inspiration.

And there is Palladio, an architect in the 16th century who stood by the "A4 paper size theory".

With a belief in this "theory", he would have built a room by starting with a perfect square, then continue to draw a diagonal line across the room from one corner to another. (K picture this one really hard now k? It's actually quite simple ). Now, move this line round to make the side of a new wall (Lost yet?) and tadaaaa!! A room constructed with this as the long wall and the side of the original squares as the short one will be in the proportions of an A4 sheet of paper! That's when you learn Mathematics the fun way :). Because if it was Pythagoras, you can easily calculate using his theorem that the proportions of this room would just be 1 to the square root of 2.

In other words it's a ratio of 1 : (2)^ 0.5

Amazingly, it cannot be expressed as whole-number ratios. Wait... but I always thought they never had calculators dulu dulu? Diorang ni, pure genius man! Square root of 2 which is also (2)^0.5, it cannot be expressed in fractions if you must know. It's infinite and most magical thing of all, it's infinite decimal expansion NEVER repeats itself. How they discovered also I don't know. I thought high technology only existed when we came into this world?

In Music language, I learnt that two notes corresponding to these lengths would produce a rather challenging interval called an augmented fourth. ( I need Ms Liew to prove this right, right about now. I vote her my scariest music teacher for what seem like the longest 6 years at that Yamaha Music School in KJ ). Yet in Architecture language, because of its close relationship to the perfect square it worked. So many things are magically beautiful in this world, Alhamdulillah.

So there we go, a geometric move that would contradict if we talk Mathematics language, challenges in Music language and purely beautiful in Architecture language 

From my previous sentence, I am surprised? Nothing oh-so-special because even Pythagoreans themselves were startled, in their own language, they were...

Startled by the revelation that simple Geometry gave rise to such disharmony that they tried to suppress the news and even drowned the person who had made the discovery.

But today, I believe every respected architecture firm is full of mathematically literate architects who, as well as knowing their P's and their Q's, know their threes from their square root of twos.

For now, I just feel so special to have the opportunity to learn geometry. I used to whine at how complicated it is, but this discovery...though may not be related to the exact topics I am learning in lectures at this current point in time,  it's surely a motivation for me! It's still about GEOMETRY at the end of the day :) 

Happy Valentines! ( though not like I celebrate it :) Not something we celebrate in my religion)

 xx