Something Mathematical About Life

Yesterday evening my lower left eyelid suddenly blew up to the size of an almond, accompanied by sneezes and general drowsiness. Within minutes, my REU family came to help—Claire diagnosed my case and consoled me with the fact that it would go away with time, Eugene offered medicine that “is really good,” and Anna made sure that at dinner we all practiced the chopstick rule, “black is personal,” and “brown is public,” preventing contamination. After a hearty vegetarian meal beginning and ending with Chinese soups (melon and red bean respectively) and drinks (strong green tea and carrot/orange/apple honey cocktail), my eyelid melted back to normal size, my nose stopped sneezing, and my mind thought clearly. As fast as it had come, the random affliction had disappeared.

After a night of smiles and happy thoughts over the degustation of two Japanese plums, a custard apple, a Chinese peach, a persimmon, and more, I found that such cyclical progress exists only in smooth periodic functions, such as sine or cosine. On this journey, I have sought over and over again to apply such mathematical rules to life—the goal of my project is to find a formula that will solve an integral that appears often in nature, but does not have an analytic solution. We believe that we are close to deriving a formula that will approximate the integral at an acceptable level of accuracy, but at best, what we will obtain will remain a mere approximation. After all, symbols, no matter how they are formulated cannot, with perfect precision, capture life. Neither numbers, nor words can correctly approximate the state of the soul.

But beyond such attempts to calculate and create, I believe in an ultimate peace, that from God we came, and to Him we shall return. Perhaps, something about life is periodic, like sine and cosine, and like the vanishing almond beneath my eye.

Claire, my thoughts and prayers are with you and your family.