Good evening, everyone! I don’t know about you, but my day was extremely eventful. At 8:30 sharp this morning, I was thrust back into some semblance of normality courtesy of my first Zoom class. Today, for me, marks the return of a loose daily structure after two weeks of none at all. Thanks to the helpful planner Ms. Michalski sent out, I even threw together a hastily-highlighted schedule for my first few days of online classes:
While there’s still plenty of open space on my schedule, I anticipate that over the next few weeks, I will slide into a routine, something I honestly welcome after a strangely aimless yet anxious break. With no friends’ houses to visit, errands to run (my dad is our designated grocery shopper), or events to attend, I’ve had nothing but my daily runs – without which I’m not sure I’d still be sane – to organize my days around. Today, I think, my life begins to return to normal.
Thinking about the title of this blog, I can’t help but observe that this opening week of virtual school also begins swing back towards normality in my dealings with math. Since walking, dazed, out of Schoolhouse Room 25 after an exhausting T2 assessment, I have given barely a passing thought to math as an academic subject. But outside the classroom, math has popped up in more places than ever before. Every day, as I update my news (or even my Instagram) feed, I consume endless statistics, graphs, data visualizations, and expert estimates informed by mathematical models. As it turns out, the medical and economic effects of a global pandemic necessitate quite a bit of math in the media. When else would one see the Washington Post writing a story on exponential curves?
And while it’s certainly been cool to see all this math in the news, the context has never been exactly calming. Now, as we all move back into Calculus Land, we’ll hopefully have plenty of math to take our minds off those ever-climbing numbers on the Johns Hopkins website.
So welcome back, everyone. Welcome back to normal life and math, or at least something bearing a faint resemblance. With time, dedication, and a healthy dose of social distancing, we can hope that we’ll all fully return to normal soon enough. Until then, thanks for reading these ramblings and please feel free to post any interesting math-related news here – there’s plenty around. Stay healthy and happy zooming!
2 replies on “Welcome Back”
I’m glad to see my home newspaper, the post, fulfilling the mathematics legacy. And, I would call this article pretty “fire” if you ask me!
So, so many math terms abound! We run an MRC here on campus… maybe we should run one for the general public to explain things like how to accurately find the sum of an infinite geometric series and the difference between linear and logarithmic scales. Like, for real.