Chesterton Rocks the Math World

The church needs to saint this man…
From Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton:
The real trouble with this world of ours is not that is an unreasonable world, nor even that is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a [...]

Charlie Chaplin and Modern Times

My family recently chuckled its way through Charlie Chaplin’s last silent film, and one of his best, “Modern Times.”  One scene near the beginning has our hero at work in a modern factory, with some sort of “widgets” sailing by him on a conveyor belt.  His job is to tighten two bolts as they go [...]

Standing on Giants

Read the following recently on “The Endeavor” blog and because I have used Newton’s quote so much, just had to post it here:
Isaac Newton famously said
If I have seen farther than others it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.
Later Mathematician R. W. Hamming added
Mathematicians stand on each other’s shoulders while computer [...]

Good Morning Young Grasshopper(s)

The headmaster was enjoying the quiet of the post-first-thing-in-the-morning-rush.  It was Friday.  The flowers were in bloom.  The storm had been replaced with beautiful sunshine.  He leaned back in his desk chair and sighed.  And noticed a nice green decent-sized grasshopper on his wall.  He asked a dad out in the main office if his [...]

School? From whence the word?

Our word “school” has an interesting derivation…
Latin
Etymology
From Ancient Greek σχολή
Noun
schola (genitive scholae); f, first declension

Leisure time given to learning.
A school; a place for learning or instruction.
A student body; the disciples of a teacher.
A sect; body of followers of a teacher or system, such as the Praetorian guard.
An art gallery.

How close or far from the above ideas are we?  Is there any connection between leisure and learning in our [...]