Pythagoras is SO BADASS

Once again, I am amazed at your talent for stream-of-consciousness descriptions. Who else could take such a mundane experience and wax philosophical for paragraphs? Well, Douglas Coupland probably. But we both love him, it's ok to compare you to him. In fact, I'd call it a compliment.

I was just working on some review of gr 11 introduction to functions (I'm in advanced functions [12 class] now because I love math so much) and I just had a bit of a eureka moment as to Pythagoras and his genius. I'd like to think that I know a little bit about mathematics- a prodigy even, if we want to go hyperbolic. But there is one great difference between prodigy and genius: a prodigy can learn, very quickly and easily, what others have already discovered. Genii, however, discover new things entirely. that is what truly separates the likes of Einstein, Euclid, Darwin and others from just intelligent people. They actually created a whole new concept: that's just outstanding. The sine law, for example:

sinA = sin B = sinC

a b c

states that the sine ratio of an angle divided by the length of the side across from it is equivalent no matter what values you substitute in. Now, that seems very simplistic now. But Abu Nasr Mansur, a Persian mathematician from the 10th century, discovered this from nothing. During the 900s, where there was hardly any education or knowledge at all, this guy created a whole new formula that can be used to learn values for any triangle at all. That's incredible. The pythagorean theorem, a² + b² = c², is amazing too. It's inconceivable how you would learn that. Did he make an observation that there was a relation? Did he just notice randomly that they were all equivalent? Did he strive for years to find a formula that could be used to solve triangles? Not much is known about his work, other than his credit in discovering this. All I can say is, no matter how intelligent I am, there is no way I could ever create something like that. Even Karl Gauss, a schoolboy in medieval germany, who discovered how to find the sum of consecutive numbers: add up all the numbers between 1 and 100. This should have taken him hours to do, but this ten year old got the answer in less than 3 minutes. Unbelievable. He revolutionized how people do math, and he hadn't even hit puberty. Just... words fail me. I don't know why people don't find these feats more impressive.

As for verity... I don't really have many thoughts about it. My first impression is that of a name, it seems like something you would name a little girl. Probably dark haired and fair skinned: snow white would be a perfect verity. But after some contemplation, it means to be truthful. An adjective, a word that can never live on its own but only used to describe a noun. Adjectives are like the sad puppies of grammar, never solo but always following other words around, improving and explaining them. They're the needy partners in a relationship, the ones who need love and more love. or maybe it's not like that at all, maybe adjectives are more like servants who live to please their master; that seems more likely. After all, adverbs deserve a place in this relationship as well: they're the jack of all trades, describing verbs, adjectives or even other adverbs. I suppose they would be a slave, or maybe just a worker slowly rising along the employment ladder. Working odd jobs, doing whatever they can until they finally reach the break even level and they get other adverbs describing them. Striving to reach higher and higher, like rabid dogs battling each other to be nearest their trainer.

So that's what I think of verity.