#ben orlin

[dodecalemma]

[inkinmyskinandsoul]

Math is a weave of many threads: the formal and the intuitive, the simple and the profound, the momentary and the eternal. Love the thread you love. But never mistake it for the tapestry.

Ben Orlin, Change Is the Only Constant

[inkinmyskinandsoul]

But for Agnesi, mathematics wasn’t about practicality. It was a sacred project, a pathway to God. Pure logical thought gave humanity its closest experience of divine cognition, of eternal truth. For someone as devout as Agnesi, that meant everything. Why sully the holy with the earthly, the geometric with the physical?

Ben Orlin, Change Is the Only Constant

[inkinmyskinandsoul]

Tolstoy’s integral fails as science, but I think it succeeds as metaphor. In the scheme of things, humans are so small that they’re almost infinitesimal, and so numerous that they’re almost infinite. And yet, add up each of those individual humans, and you get humanity. By this logic, history does not belong to any group or subset of us-not to kings, nor to presidents, nor to warrior goddesses called Beyonce; not to any single lady, but to all the single ladies.

Ben Orlin, Change Is the Only Constant

[inkinmyskinandsoul]

You never really “reach” a limit. Approach it, sure – so close you can smell it, so close that it aches – but you don’t arrive. The jump to the limit is an act of transcendence; it’s akin to the leap of mortality, the transformation from time-bound body to timeless soul. Why should every property survive the journey? Our bodies have hair and teeth; do we expect an afterlife of hairy, toothy spirits?  The miracle of calculus, the unfathomable secret of the whole discipline, is that so much does survive the mortal leap. The derivative and the integral are both defined by limits. Yet they don’t collapse in paradox. They work.

Ben Orlin, Change Is the Only Constant

[inkinmyskinandsoul]

I love coining mathematical words. At least, I love trying. The brutal truth is that “canceltharsis” (the gratification of terms cancelling out) and “algebrage” (the incandescent anger of losing hours to a small algebraic error) haven't really caught on yet.

Ben Orlin, Change Is the Only Constant

[inkinmyskinandsoul]

All the world’s a differential equation, and the men and women are merely variables.

Ben Orlin, Change Is the Only Constant

[dodecalemma]