To Smile or Not To Smile: How mathematicians do it
FSP has an interesting commentary on smiling at people and how not smiling can cause people to be think you're angry. Reading many of the comments got me thinking about one of my former teachers.
Fred was my trig teacher at NDSU. He's polynesian but grew up in Holland. He is incredibly smart, always sounds like he's yelling, and tells the funniest stories. If you know who I'm talking about, you're probably laughing already.
One day in class, he relayed how you can tell a true mathematician: not only do they walk around with a vacant stare, they are always drawing graphs in the air. (I have later come to the conclusion that this only applies to mathematicians who work in the more visual aspects of the topic, such as graph theory or topology. The other ones are more likely to talk to themselves.)
Toward the end of the quarter, I was walking to class and thinking about something involving trig functions. My hand suddenly flew out in front of me, and my finger began tracing something on a unit circle and comparing it with a Cartesian representation.
I stopped cold. "OMG! I'm doing it!" I thought to myself.
That should have been an early warning.
Regardless, I have discovered that when I am doing this (and yes, I still walk around flailing my hands and drawing in the air), no one ever has thought of me as rude if I ignored them. They probably thought I needed to be locked up in the state hospital, but I was most definitely not being rude. I also was never interrupted.
Fred was my trig teacher at NDSU. He's polynesian but grew up in Holland. He is incredibly smart, always sounds like he's yelling, and tells the funniest stories. If you know who I'm talking about, you're probably laughing already.
One day in class, he relayed how you can tell a true mathematician: not only do they walk around with a vacant stare, they are always drawing graphs in the air. (I have later come to the conclusion that this only applies to mathematicians who work in the more visual aspects of the topic, such as graph theory or topology. The other ones are more likely to talk to themselves.)
Toward the end of the quarter, I was walking to class and thinking about something involving trig functions. My hand suddenly flew out in front of me, and my finger began tracing something on a unit circle and comparing it with a Cartesian representation.
I stopped cold. "OMG! I'm doing it!" I thought to myself.
That should have been an early warning.
Regardless, I have discovered that when I am doing this (and yes, I still walk around flailing my hands and drawing in the air), no one ever has thought of me as rude if I ignored them. They probably thought I needed to be locked up in the state hospital, but I was most definitely not being rude. I also was never interrupted.