I don't remember the quadratic equation.

You know you can sing it to "Pop Goes the Weasel," right?

First you take the negative b
Plus or minus square root
B squared minus 4 a c
All over 2 a.

Hee. I learned almost the same quadratic formula song as Emily, except we learned it as "x is equal to negative b, plus or minus the square root of," etc.

When I went Passover shopping this year, they were out of the brands of matzo I usually get, so I bought some British brand. They're thinner than I'm used to, and rectangular instead of square. Interesting.

When I was in high school and I couldn't get to sleep, sometimes I'd derive the quadratic equation in my head....

I found it a little annoying in HS math where we spent several days solving quadratic equations before they showed us the formula, which suddenly made things much easier. But then I just figured "that's the way math is...."

I only learned the song in grad school! But I learned it both ways, and of course if the teacher worries that the students might get confused when b is negative, you might want to make it "opposite b," as one teacher I worked with said it.

Oh, and no one taught us any songs. We just had to know it (by memorizing it any way we could). Um, uphill, and in the snow.

Oh, and no one taught us any songs.

Me neither! Brutally unfair. And none of the kids here seem to have heard it either, so I'm going to be spreading the gospel of math jingles.

I hate feeling so ignorant of math. It's such a huge part of science, and I might as well be looking at Swahili as look at anything beyond basic algebra. I wonder if there's a way to go to the local community college and say, "I want to take Math as a Second Language."

I'm fascinated by higher math that uses letters for numbers (I'm thinking specifically of the numbers e and i), but it makes something in my brain short-circuit when I try to actually learn it beyond what i stands for.

When I first learned that discrete math exists, it was via a conversation, so I didn't know it was "discrete," not "discreet," and I commented that it must be a bunch of numbers in trench coats and fedoras lurking in dark alleys.

And THAT, my friends, is why Teppy will never be a mathematician. I like imagining their inner lives too much.

a bunch of numbers in trench coats and fedoras lurking in dark alleys.

Teppy - those sound like covert numbers, not discreet ones.

::runs away::

ETA ::but returns to point to the story of my last math exam evar, in which I was asked to state why the square root of i was irrational. Five paragraphs and a definition of reality/rationality later..."::