math – meghan rose allen

fiction / artisanal mathematics

By meghan rose on Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Likely it is of little surprise to those who follow me on twitter that I am not in a unicorns-shitting-rainbows sort of place. Makes sense. Two years in one place blahs and winter coming. But someone, via Geoff, said it makes em feel better, my little sad toasts to the world, so here I am, little sad toasting.

When I am down, I get this feeling that there is nothing inside me at all except reflecting what other people are. If I am around someone who is happy, then I smile. If I am around someone who is sad, then I am sad. Like there is nothing to me that exists outside of other people. Since I work, alone, at home, by myself, during half the day or so, I guess I’m just air then, floating, writing endless iterations of writing exercises plus faerie story.

Yesterday I slept from 9.30 to 1.45.

In 2011, I was convinced I was a good writer. I want to go back to that. Right now, I have convinced myself that I am an above-average writer, which is a far step down from good. But, in my attempt to be more positive about my writing, I ordered business cards to hand out to, who exactly? The people I stand at the school bus stop with? I’m not really sure. But I did. And here they are.

I still can’t give up the math part yet. I spent ten years to get that string of letters after my name. The other side of the business card has info you can figure out from the Contact page.

So, if being successful means having business cards, then I am now successful with my business cards. Next time I see you, trust me I’ll be pressing one of these babies into your hand.

fiction writing math

My Ideal Job

By meghan rose on Monday, June 16, 2014

At the end of my undergraduate career, I found a paint-your-own-pottery place. Rather than go to my graduation, I went to the paint-your-own-pottery place and painted some plates. Leaving afterwards, I was euphoric. It felt like I hadn’t done anything creative in five years, which, other than math, I hadn’t.

The end of undergrad was ten years ago. I’ve been writing full-time for two years now. Last month, I downloaded a logic game for the iPad with over five thousand puzzles in it and I play it constantly, staying awake to do the next puzzle, then the next one, then the next one. I think I’m missing math.

I keep thinking about my ideal job: do math research for as long as I want, then do creative writing for as long as I want, back and forth. Of course, I could do that now; I have the time and I have the resources. But is it a devaluation of myself to be giving my work away for free? I already get little-to-no remuneration for the stories I write. Throw in free mathematical research in there, and what? I’d like to think my work is worth something, but it’s also a bit esoteric and pure math researcher doesn’t have any immediate real-world applications. As my twitter handle says: Reality is not my domain.

Maybe I’ll go prove something about math today. Just to be sure that I still can.

books math

when copy-readers and typesetters are not scientists

By meghan rose on Tuesday, August 6, 2013

I am reading a book. One of the characters studied physics, which makes me wonder about him, but his focus is astronomy, which is a useless as my pure math degrees, so I warmed to him somewhat.

So character (his name is Nick) thinks about math. Nick thinks about equations. The author decides to write these equations out for us, and we get

z(r) = sqrt(R3/2M)[sqrt(1-(1-(2Mr2/R3)))] for r <=R

Perhaps one is thinking that I do not have $latex \LaTeX$ installed in wordpress and am typing out what the math should be. All that is wrong. Of course I have $latex \LaTeX$ installed with wordpress. In fact, $latex \LaTeX$ comes pre-installed with more versions of wordpress. Secondly, I would have put the slashes, underbars, carots, etc, probably a text box for the for. No, this is, verbatim, what was written on the page, assuming I transcribed the brackets correctly.

Maybe Nick thinks in $latex \LaTeX$-esque thoughts? The book is set in the early eighties, so we’ll reduce that to TeX thoughts? But he isn’t attached to a university, so is that likely? Moreover, in thinking, would someone think sqrt instead of $latex \sqrt{\,}$? I wouldn’t.

So I come to the conclusion that the typesetter and the copy-readers don’t really know how equations work, how equation-thinking people think of equations. I assume this is a real astronomy equation. I assume that the author copied it down from a textbook or paper, where it was written, I assume as:

$latex z(r) = \displaystyle \left(\sqrt{\frac{R^3}{2M}}\right)\left(\sqrt{1-\left(1-\frac{2Mr^2}{R^3}\right)}\right) \text{ for } r \le R.$

Perhaps not exactly that (I haven’t taken physics since high school, a class in which a ninety percent of our work was determining what a Newton scale would read while it held a variety of weights while going up and down at certain speeds on an elevator) but something similar. But I cannot imagine that the author found an equation written as it ended up in her book in a scientific setting. Instead, somehow, via editors and typesetters and copy-readers, we got from the second equation to the first one, probably either under the assumption that the first is more palatable for a non-science audience or via a typesetter who had never seen how to typeset mathematics before.

Either way, this made me unhappy or angry or something in between.

math

math?

By meghan rose on Friday, March 1, 2013

This is in no way related to writing, but I want to see if the LaTeX add-in works: [latex]\displaystyle \sum_{i=1}^k x_{k}^n[/latex].