Hi, friends, how is it going out there? I am feeling more peaceful than I was during my spring break, which seems a little weird and out of sync with the zeitgeist. At the moment I am sitting in my living room drinking a small glass of Ramazzotti (tastes to me like licorice, orange peel, assorted mystery herbal flavors; I'm a fan) and thinking about high school math.
My algebra II teacher changed my life, because he taught me that I could be good at math. I was willing to learn pretty much anything he thought I should know, but I suffered from a long and unyielding resistance to the idea of logarithms. He was teaching us logarithms as a calculation strategy, which was much less relevant in the post-calculator era than in any era that came before. I could not suppress the grumbling. Why are we learning this? What possible use could there be for this material? Do you envision a zombie apocalypse in which we have no calculator batteries but access to log tables is preserved? I do not envision any such apocalypse, said mid-eighties Jamie.
These days I use logarithmic transformations for a lot of my research data, and I think of Mr. Lilly pretty much every time. I have been watching the COVID-19 stats like it's my job (4 new cases since I started this post, she said obsessively), and I am deriving a weird comfort from the tidy linearity of the log-transformed data (toggle button at the top of the y axis, for those of you who also find math weirdly comforting). This is a phenomenon we can understand, because math helps us make sense of the world. We can work together to bend that line downward, because its linearity will rapidly cease to be in any way comforting.
When I googled Mr. Lilly tonight I discovered that he died in January. I don't think he ever knew that he sparked a shift in the way that I saw myself, a shift that eventually led me to pursue a PhD. I am thinking tonight about the ways we are all connected to each other, and the truth that good teachers can influence students in ways they will never see.
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