# What was the first bit of mathematics that made you realize that math is beautiful? (For children's book)

I'm a children's book writer and illustrator, and I want to to create a book for young readers that exposes the beauty of Mathematics. I recently read Paul Lockhart's essay "The Mathematician's Lament," and found that I, too, lament the uninspiring quality of my elementary math education.

I want to make a book that discredits the notion that math is merely a series of calculations, and inspires a sense of awe and genuine curiosity in young readers.

However, I myself am mathematically unsophisticated.

What was the first bit of mathematics that made you realize that math is beautiful?

For the purposes of this children's book, accessible answers would be appreciated.

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Nice question, but should probably be community wiki? –  mrf Mar 7 '13 at 7:02
For me Euclid's proof of the infinitude of primes was the first thing that made me realize the beauty of mathematics. –  Manjil P. Saikia Mar 7 '13 at 7:02
Wow. Just last night I had a fierce argument with one of the bartenders of my usual watering hole who is a mechanical engineering student. He insisted that he has a better idea than me of what is mathematics. I am so going to print him a copy of Lockhart's text. Thank you for that link! –  Asaf Karagila Mar 7 '13 at 7:59
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t think that mathematics was beautiful and fascinating. –  Brian M. Scott Mar 7 '13 at 15:06
Although I don't know if it's what you are looking for, try looking up "vihart" on youtube--Even if it's not helpful, I guarantee you will appreciate it. –  Bill K Mar 8 '13 at 2:57
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## 130 Answers

If you're writing a children's book on mathematics, please start by reading some excellent children's books dealing with mathematics. Here are some books I have fond memories of:

• The Man Who Counted
• The Phantom Tollbooth
• Flatland
• Alice in Wonderland / Through the Looking Glass
• Everything by Martin Gardner
• Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Thread
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I think one of my early favourite mathematical things was simply "proof by contradiction" -- any of them.

I think its appeal is that you nearly have proof by example, except that you're proving a negative.

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When I was a kid, I remember that I used to make 'little discoveries', although after I got all excited I realised other people already knew this and I didn't discover anything new, I was always really proud when I made one of those discoveries, Here are a few that I made and approximately how old I was when I did make the discovery (just saying I am 13 years old right now).

• An odd number plus an odd number is even, an even number plus an even number is even, and odd plus even is odd (approximately age 4-5)
• The rule for the Fibonacci sequence (I remember I saw it on the board or something in my classroom and then I just found the pattern) (age 6, I remember this one accurately bc it was during the first year of my primary education)
• If you rip a piece of paper in half, and then both in half again, and again etc, the number of pieces of paper you have when you ripped it $n$ times is $2^n$ (age 10)
• The fact that you can split a triangle into two right triangles and apply trig ratios to them (I later learned the Sine and Cosine Laws so yeah) (age 11)
• I was learning differential calculus, and I didn't know integral calculus yet. My dad told me that a integral is the inverse of the derivative, Then I figured out the rule that offsets the power rule and I figured out that the integral of nothing is an arbitrary constant (When i officially learnt integral calculus I found the proper formulas and I was just using the wrong symbols) (age 12)
• I proved to myself that the cardinality of the set of Reals and the set of Complex numbers are the same (age 13)
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I started math reasonably late, so I'm not sure this is a perfect example for a children book. I was totally amazed that the number $\pi$ is encountered in completely unrelated situation. Of course, I knew it's a ratio of circumference of the circle to the diameter, but then I learnt of the Normal probability density function.

So if you stretch a bell-shaped curve (Gaussian function) from $-\infty$ to $\infty$ the area under it $converges$ to $\sqrt{\pi}$?? How is it possible that this area has something to do with the square root of the ratio of circumference of the circle to the diameter? To be honest, even now, after learning the related proofs and derivations I still find it quite baffling.

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I have to admit that although I'd frequently been told that mathematics was "beautiful", I didn't really get that while I was in school - even high school. I enjoyed mathematics, and saw plenty of things that were fun, and even cute, but I never really understood any ideas with sufficient depth to think of them as beautiful.

When I did encounter ideas that I found beautiful, it was in my first year at college. In fact, there were two closely related ideas in quick succession. We were just being introduced to vector spaces. This was the first time I'd seen an abstract space, but it didn't really seem to mean much except as a fancy way to talk about high dimensional Euclidean spaces.

But then I saw my first example of a vector space that didn't just look like the vectors I'd seen in high school. It was the space of infinitely differentiable functions: $C^{\infty}$. We were shown the linear operators associated with two common differential equations (exponential growth and simple harmonic motion): \begin{eqnarray} &\frac{\textrm{d}\phantom{y}}{\textrm{d}t} - kI \\ &\frac{\textrm{d}^{2}\phantom{y}}{\textrm{dt}^2} + kI. \end{eqnarray} We saw the fairly routine proofs that these were linear operators on $C^{\infty}$, but then came the magical part: The solution sets to these differential equations were subspaces of $C^{\infty}$, the canonical solutions I was familiar with were basis sets for these solution spaces, and the solution spaces were actually the nullspaces of these operators!

Later (maybe even in that same lecture) we saw how linear regression - the hitherto tedious process of finding the "line of best fit" - could be understood as a linear projection $P$ operator onto a two dimensional subspace of the data space. Given a data vector $\mathbf{x}$, the projected vector $P\mathbf{x}$ represented the line that was closest to the data - the line of best fit - and the difference term $\mathbf{x}-P\mathbf{x}$ represented the error term. I was astonished at how much more elegant this was than the clunky formulas I'd had to memorize in high school.

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Not an experience of mine, but I'm currently reading "The Greeks" by H. D. F. Kitto and I think this page deserves to be here:

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I first discovered that math was beautiful upon learning the divisibility rules. At that point I was just like "IT WORKS IT WORKS! HOW DID PEOPLE KNOW THAT?!" I remember I once stayed up to test the divisibility rule of dividing by $8$ (if the last three numbers in the dividend are divisible by $8$ then the whole number is divisible by $8$).

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My first think of infinity was square diagonal vs. orthogonal stepping. Start with route (0,0) -- (0,1) -- (1,1), then take (0,0) -- (0,½) -- (½,½) -- (1,½) -- (1,1) and so on. Form of later will come closer to diagonal, but lenght will not.

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I must have been very small, around three of four, when I suddenly dashed out of my room, full of excitement, wanting to show my dad something that had made a great impression on me.

I held a book, it's front cover facing me.

In a flash, I gave it two half-turns. One upside-down, the other left to right. This is what came out:

I held my breath, as the trick wasn't over yet. Sure enough, two same quick moves and -lo and behold- the front cover was facing me properly again, just as in the beginning.

"Look! Dad!" :)

That surely must have been my first conscious encounter with symmetry.

I held the memory dearly close for a number of years but then forgot about it completely. It came back to me, only very recently, after going through the first pages of Nathan Carter's Visual Group Theory and seeing this image:

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I don't find it beautiful, but I still find the idea expressed by the following something of a psychological curiosity:

How can it be that when some algebraists say "AND" and "OR" they mean exactly the same thing?

OR means this that "false or false" is false, "false or true", "true or false" as well as "true or true" are true, or more compactly:

    F  T
F  F  T
T  T  T


AND means this:

    F  T
F  F  F
T  F  T


But, since NOT(x OR y)=(NOT x AND NOT y) and NOT(T)=F and NOT(F)=T, OR and AND, to an algebraist, mean exactly the same thing!

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