Unfortunately for me, they are not my financial insights. If I had any financial savvy I wouldn’t be a math blogger. But recently I was googling “math mojo” and I came upon the Reading the Markets blog. In this post, the author says, “I think we profit enormously from looking at alternative approaches to a problem.” She mentions this MathMojo blog as an example thereof.
I was impressed, not just for the ego stroke, but by the fact that the author “gets it.” It turns out that she is a Yale-trained philosopher, so I imagine that she gets it more than I do. But I was glad that my message is getting through. MathMojo isn’t simply about math and arithmetic. It’s about approaching things differently, and training and trusting your brain.
The “Reading the Markets” blog is about “Insights from Financial Literature’” a subject that is Greek to me (sorry about the pun, Brenda). But if it were a subject of interest for me, I know I’d make a bee-line for that blog. Insights always trump information.
If you learn no math from MathMojo, but learn that the “standard algorithm” (or the standard way to do anything) is only one way to skin a cat, and not necessarily the best way, then you’ve “gotten it.”
Getting out of “but the teacher said we have to do it this way” way of thinking is about the best thing you can do for your mental development. Yeah, maybe you have to do it that way in school, to get a grade, but please realize that grading is a way for schools to keep you obedient, not make you enlightened.
Go ahead and give the teachers what they want, but make sure you pursue anything you like to a much higher degree than those minimums they call “standards.”
Be an uncommon denominator.
Hotcha!
Brian (a.k.a. Professor Homunculus )
Hi there,
I know this doesn’t go here, but I couldn’t figure out how to comment elsewhere. I just wanted to say how much I appreciate your system of KenKen notation (writing in all possile digits and erasing as you go along). I’ve been playing for a while, so all your strategies were familiar to me, but the notation system let me move from moderate 8-by-8′s to difficult 9-by-9′s overnight. Thanks! Did you come up with it?
James,
I am so glad it helped you. If you are referring to the method of writing the digits in positions in the boxes and then erasing, yes, as far as I know I did come up with it myself, but I’m sure lots and lots of Sudoku and Kenken players came up with it themselves before me. It just seemed to make so much sense.
Now I do it by just making dots in the positions, without writing actual numbers. Once you’re used to the numbers there, the dots make it more streamlined. I’ll put some vids of that up, eventually, but probably not too soon, as I’ve got a lot of addition and multiplication vids in the works at the moment.
Happy solving!
Brian