If you have an aspiring mathie or an amateur astronomer in your family, keep fueling their passion.
Experts are often grown up children who turned a passion into a full blown profession.
I enjoy a good interview with experts like Francis Su, author of Mathematics for Human Flourishing or reading astounding articles in American Scientific like the one about the Crab Nebula.
Nebula
Have you seen the latest images of the Crab Nebula? Some astronomer stuck with a childhood hobby long enough to develop an expertise in using the James Webb Space Telescope and captured jaw-droppingly beautiful images of this after-effect of a supernova.
The astounding part is that the Nebula, when seen with a pair of binoculars, looks like a wisp of microscopic cloud on the edge of the constellation, Taurus. That wisp is eleven trillion miles wide.
We live during a century of discovery that is literally mind-blowing.
Math
Every so often I dust off my degree in mathematics to remind myself I was able to pass math exams at one time. Francis Su is a super smart guy who breathes mathematics. Where some view math as a pain in the neck, Su sees beauty. “One of the things I love about doing math is enjoying the beauty of it and being able to see how math can help you see the unseen, to help you see aspects of the world that you didn’t see before.”
If you haven’t noticed, astronomy and math can be humbling. They should be. Both reveal the thoughtful, beautiful work of an unseen Creator God.
“Your thoughts—how rare, how beautiful!
God, I’ll never comprehend them!
I couldn’t even begin to count them—
any more than I could count the sand of the sea.
Oh, let me rise in the morning and live always with you!”
Psalm 139:17,18 (The Message)
“Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.”
Galileo Galilei
Thinkers
If you’ve got elementary-aged kids or grandkids, they may not want much to do with math, but at least help them develop a love of star gazing. In doing so you may be surprised that you helped them become good thinkers.
“The way you inspire people to play music isn’t by making them learn lots of musical scales; you show them the beauty of a symphony. That’s what motivates people to want to play their scales. It’s the same with math. We don’t need better human calculators. What we really need are better thinkers.”
What do you think about that?
Please be thoughtful and join the conversation. Do you love star gazing on a clear summer night? How about math? Leave a comment below. Thank you.
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