Math of Life

A co-worker friend of mine at the warehouse, that gifted me The Bro Code, piped up the other day that if you converted each letter of the alphabet into a number, starting with A is 1, and Z is 26 that "math" equals 42.

13 (M) + 1 (A) + 20 (T) + 8 (H) = 42

According to the Douglas Adams book, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the answer "to life, the universe, and everything" is 42. Douglas was quoted why the number 42, despite plausible theories presented, "The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do' I typed it out. End of story."

So it's complete coincidence that the answer to life ended up as M-A-T-H. Even more so, that mathematics has been explained to me as a pure language.

I was so fascinated with the thought of math being a language, I sought out the book, Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick.

My Advance Placement Calculus teacher was thrilled when I showed her the book after it's purchase, and that I wanted to put together a presentation as my "book report".

I found the Menger sponge, a mathematically formulated, zero-volume square, absolutely fascinating object. In addition, I also loved the Koch snowflake, with Cantor set, and lastly, Antoine's necklace.

Every since then, I always chuckled to myself when another student would moan, "when the hell will this every apply in life after school?"

Math maybe hard, but so is life, isn't it?

'los; out