Driving
I love long car drives; although I must say that the drive I did yesterday wasn’t very lovable, as it included bad weather, unusually heavy traffic, a lot of construction and a lot of accidents. As for many people , long drives give me the opportunity to turn problems over and over again in my head. Eventually, I get sick of thinking about the various personal traumas in my life and think of a math problem to work out in my head. The problem I came up with yesterday had to do with the relationship of the actual length of a diagonal of a triangle and the concept of limits, as used in calculus. For some reason I thought the relationship of the area of a polygon and the area of a circle were related to my original question, so I tried to remember the equation for the area of a polygon. When I couldn’t remember it, I tried to derive it in my head from what I knew about triangles. I couldn’t do that in my head, so I thought about how I’d figure it out when I got home, which involved which math books and how much paper I’d need. When I arrived home, exhausted from the grueling drive and starving hungry, do you think I unpacked the car and ate something before I did anything else? No. I went straight to my math books and when I couldn’t figure out my problem, I started thinking of who I could ask to help me. Then I ate something. No wonder I am usually tired and hungry.
