While I would not have expressed it quite so baldly, I do think Gene makes a valid point here --- admittedly concerning George's style rather than Jim's. The trouble with briefly fashionable jargon such as "cool" (along with heaven knows how many similarly irritating terms of approbation) is that it pigeonholes its author within some recent but no longer fashionable generation, thereby both losing respect from any later waves with which he may have been intending to ingratiate himself, as well as appearing juvenile to those more (unapologetically) antique. Fred Lunnon On 7/2/15, Mike Stay <metaweta@gmail.com> wrote:
How sad---you're probably missing lots of cool stuff!
On Thu, Jul 2, 2015 at 9:12 AM, Eugene Salamin via math-fun <math-fun@mailman.xmission.com> wrote:
When an author describes something as "cool", unless it has to do with temperature, I tend to think the author is an idiot, and I move on to something else.
-- Gene
From: George Hart <george@georgehart.com> To: math-fun@mailman.xmission.com Sent: Thursday, July 2, 2015 6:36 AM Subject: Re: [math-fun] Draft of "The Lessons of a Square-Wheeled Trike"
Hi Jim,
You asked about the hypocycloid with gears in ratio 2:1 being used in a straight-line mechanism. That possibility was well known in the 1800s but I don't know examples of its practical use. See for example Mechanism 329 in the book 507 Mechanical Movements: http://507movements.com/mm_329.html
In your discussion of MoMath, I think you miss a bigger point that part of the intention in the exhibits is to show people that Math is Cool (I even put that literally on the walls of the rest rooms) and is a living, creative subject. When explaining the square wheeled trike exhibit, besides the issue of catenaries, I also try to explain that the more math you know the more cool things you can think of and create, and that math is valuable for creative arts and design in addition to the usual subjects people think of when talking about applied mathematics. These aspects of mathematics that are obvious to mathematicians are not well understood by the public.
George http://georgehart.com
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-- Mike Stay - metaweta@gmail.com http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~mike http://reperiendi.wordpress.com
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