Add it up

All of my college career, and indeed, most of my academic life, has been spent trying to avoid math. I found its rules to be too strict and arbitrary and quite frankly boring. I had to give each number its own personality and turn equations into struggles between good and evil in order to even begin to process a problem. I'm not making this up: when I was in first grade I was uninterested in addition and subtraction unless there were "nice" and "mean" numbers that I could make a story out of.
So instead of the one required math class in college, I enrolled in a ton of film and screenwriting and sociology courses where I could explore storytelling with fewer boundaries and more symbols (twenty-six letters, plus punctuation is greater than ten digits plus plus-signs). Finally, the last semester of my senior year, I was forced kicking and screaming into the pre-calculus class I had avoided for so long.
It’s not so bad. I mean, it’s awful and I hate it, but if you ignore that for a moment, it’s not so bad.
I actually pulled an A on the last test (79 points + 15 extra credit = 94 points = 94%), and during my religion class where I have a tendency to day dream, I sometimes see the concepts of good and evil expressed as math problems. Part of it is that we’re studying the meaning of a lot of symbols and numbers (three, the number of the divine, plus four, the number of creation or the cosmos, equals seven, the number of perfection and three times four equals twelve, the number of completeness and religion), but still . . . since I usually turn numbers into concepts instead of the other way around, it’s a bit backwards for me.
But my biggest appreciation of arithmetic this semester came yesterday when my professor was discussing arcs and degrees (as in 360 degrees in a circle) and I asked him why the system didn’t just operate with a decimal system like most of math does.
Never one to turn up a good math-related story, my professor, who is Mexican and talks like Strong Bad (“Ok, ok, so the point is, basically, that your weekend will be sooooo much cooler with math!”) explained that the first people to do this sort of math were the Babylonians, who operated on a base-six system, which was passed down to us.
Now ancient Babylon is modern-day Baghdad in Iraq, and that got me thinking about how modern mathematics really is an international product that combines many traditions and developments from throughout time and across the globe.
To just graph a circle and compute its area we have to use the Babylonian base-six system transposed into the Arabic base-ten, or decimal system (complete with the handy, Arab-invented zero) and charted onto a French Cartesian plane and partially represented with a Greek symbol (pi), which has been most recently calculated most fully (although not exactly) by a Japanese mathematician.
Not only is math an international language, it is the result of a grand and widespread international collaboration. Could dreaded math actually be a symbol for peace?