July 17, 2008 at 6:57 am
· Filed under Personal
There are many who associate coding for web as math. Others say math has nothing to do with coding for web. Im in the class as the second statement. In fact, Im in algebra class as I write this. I can confidently say coding for web is NOT math. I suck at math and despite people’s common misperception that geeks are supposed to be good at math, this statement is still false.
Mathematics and coding has its similarities but I repeat, “simply is not one in the same”. In coding for the web, no matter what language, your writing specific commands that tell the server or the browser to do something. Your simply talking to the browser and the browser is simply interpreting your commands. So if Math is coding, then, is it safe to say so is the English language? If so, lets change the entire school system to reflect this. Notice how English class in school is titled “Language ARTS”. Math isn’t involved in language, there for the coding lanuages for the web, primarily the most important “HTML” which stands for “HYPER TEXT MARKUP LANGUAGEEEEEE” is in fact NOT math. In any way shape or form. The only similarity is numbers are used, not calculated.
Sigh - now back to my class….
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Math appears everywhere in Nature, from the leaf arrangement in plants, to the pattern of the florets of a flower, the bracts of a pinecone, or the scales of a pineapple. Fibonacci numbers which are a mathematical sequence are therefore applicable to the growth of every living thing, including a single cell, a grain of wheat, a hive of bees, and even all of mankind.
Plants do not know about this sequence - they just grow in the most efficient ways. Plants show the Fibonacci numbers in the arrangement of the leaves around the stem. Some pine cones and fir cones also show the numbers, as do daisies and sunflowers. Sunflowers can contain the number 89, or even 144. Coniferous trees show these numbers in the bumps on their trunks. And palm trees show the numbers in the rings on their trunks.
Why do these arrangements occur? In the case of leaf arrangement, some of the cases may be related to maximizing the space for each leaf, or the average amount of light falling on each one. In the case of close-packed leaves in cabbages and succulents the correct arrangement may be crucial for availability of space.
In the seeming randomness of the natural world, we find mathematical order involving the Fibonacci numbers themselves and the closely related “Golden” elements. If this all happens in the natural world and we can only hope to emulate and understand a fraction of the reality of the beauty and complexity of nature then all art is math and all math is art…. no matter what we are doing
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