¡Hola Mundo! - Book N
This is just a place for me to document and share my newfound fascination with mathematics. In the summer of 2022 at North Carolina’s Governor’s School West, I got to attend several math lectures. These lectures changed my perspective on mathematics. I had always been somewhat interested in math, but never enough to explore it in my free time. Math was a means to an end, nothing more.
Attending those lectures helped me see the beauty in mathematics, and since then I have tried to teach myself some mathematical concepts in my free time. I haven’t had much free time to explore this interest, but I return to my notebook whenever I can. I have several notebooks filled with art, to-do lists, birthday cards, cool flowers, chemistry notes, and my math explorations. They are labelled as Books 0, 1, 2, 3, and so on. As this is intended to be the highlights from these books, I’ve named this site Book N. There’s no particular audience for this site. It’s mostly for my own benefit, but I’ve chosen to leave it public so I can share this with friends. Also, I wanted to get better at html and and improve my web design skills. I’m putting projects in the “entries” section; I probably won’t update it too often but I hope to update it semi-regularly, if only to continue improving my web dev skills.
Today I tried to recreate for my chemistry class a presentation that changed my life. At Governor’s School last year one of the math teachers gave an optional lectured titled Shape of the Universe. Although this wasn’t the only math lecture I attended at Governor’s School, and I probably wouldn’t have said it was my favorite at the time, it is the one that has stuck with me the most. The original Shape of the Universe presentation, along with the other math presentations at Governor’s School, really changed my perspective on math....
The Problem The surface whose area the problem asks us to find This is the most recent problem that I’ve had fun with. My friend Aria had a problem on her math homework that interested me: “A square hole with a cross length of 4 is cut symmetrically through a sphere of radius 2. Find the remaining surface area.” The Process I kicked this problem around in my head for a few days....