Albert Einstein said – “Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.” Here’s what he meant:
You are sitting in your class and your friend asks for a pen. You take one out and are about to throw it towards your friend, what do you do?
There would be three ways to make this happen:
- Throw it up so that it bounces off the ceiling and goes to your friend,
- Throw it towards the ground so that it slides over to your friend
- Or the obvious one: throw it at an angle so that it reaches your friend directly.
Add a bunch of imaginary lines and you get one of the most important topics in coordinate geometry:
The ‘Slope’ – the distance your pen travels in the vertical or y-direction divided by the distance your pen travels in the horizontal or x-direction.
The concept of slope empowers you to understand three crucial ideas in mathematics which are generally hard to grasp:
- when two lines are perpendicular
- calculating the unit cost of an item
- finding out the rate of change of a moving object and completely understanding the concept of differentiation.
All mathematical concepts, no matter how hard they may seem, can be boiled down to solving a real-life problem. Just like we did now!
Richard Feynman said — “Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organisation of the entire tapestry.” If we only look at the complex formulas and try to understand what they mean, we will never succeed.
All we need to do is try to go one step further, learn the most basic principles and work our way backward.
