Sustainable Math

Self similarity is important in nature and what the study of fractals is all about. Study of fractals has taken people well beyond the paisley curves of the 70s and into the rainforest. In studies that are also tied into biomimicry and what we can learn from nature, scientists are finding that studying one tree in a rainforest can tell a great deal about the rest of the forest. Why? Self similarity.

I was good at math back in the day, but at trig the way math was taught lost me. It was no longer connected to the world I live in. It became abstract. Now maybe I am not a total formula driven geek, but math DID work for me at one time and became lost because of the way it has been taught. That has bothered me for a long, long time.

The other day I was talking to my son about his studying for the GRE and told me he forgot how to do long division. Math had become remote from his life as well - and he went to calculus. He regained that lost knowledge in his studying, but it made me think about something I have done for the next Sustainable Development class this Winter. I am connecting the dots. We are going to do math and it is not going to be separated from the world, but integrated into the subject we are learning. I am going to do it too. And I found the perfect book for this.

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Environmental Issues: An Introduction to Sustainability, 3/E
Robert L. McConnell
Daniel C. Abel

ISBN-10: 0131566504
ISBN-13: 9780131566507

This book is cool, and I have ordered it for my class. I ordered it because it integrates sustainability with math... oh, and the metric system. It is time.

The new world of sustainable life is going to require that we are math proficient. Isaac Newton was the mathematical genius for the linear revolution of science, but it is time we move beyond that and enter the quantum and hopefully unified field world of math. We don't have to start with calculus (Newton), or Fractal or Quantum math (Bohr, Mandelbrot +), but we will never get there if we don't become comfortable with everyday math, and see how it integrates with our lives and what the possibilities are.

I am a long way from knowing where we are going, but believe that math integrated into our lives, sustainable math, can do a lot for our future.

For a look at the fractal math of the forest and fractals in general please go to http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/fractals/program.html

Reference

Bailey, Joseph K. , Randy K. Bangert, Jennifer A. Schweitzer, R. Talbot Trotter III, Stephen M. Shuster and Thomas G. Whitham. "Fractal Geometry Is Heritable in Trees," Evolution, 58:9 Sep., 2004.

Sole, Ricard V. and Susanna C. Manrubia. "Are rainforests self-organized in a critical state?"Journal of Theoretical Biology, 1731, March 1995