Mathematics lectures revisited – thanks to Oxymoron

-Bernard Fernandes

A few days back a post on the Facebook home page caught my attention. It read: “STC ad at the airport: Riyadh di Janeiro.” Below that was a tongue-in-cheek comment by my friend: ‘Oxymoron of the year’.  Through a remarkable coincidence, a list of oxymorons followed on my mobile. The sms read: Clearly misunderstood, Exact estimate, small crowd, act naturally, found missing.

Set me thinking. Why not some oxymorons in Mathematics – after all, it is a subject I love!  Unlike the English language, Mathematics is not spoilt for choice in the oxymoron domain. Here are a few after having scraped the barrel:

Sitting in the classrooms of the haloed precincts of the Nowrosjee Wadia College, Pune attending Mathematics lectures is a vivid recollection. In my time, Nowrosjee Wadia College was renowned and the most sought after college for a degree in Mathematics – it had the names of some top class Mathematics professors: Mugad, Rao, Andar…to name a few. However learning Abstract Algebra was not simple. And the terms used therein were far removed from reality – as the topic suggests!  Take for instance, ‘delta neighbourhood of a point p’. It is a concept pivotal to the topic on limits – and thereafter to related topics of Calculus that begin to spiral out of control! To make it practical, it is the set of points in the vicinity (neighbours!) of p; and applying it to ‘limits’, a point from this set ‘tends to’ p when the distance gets extra small on either side of the point, but has not reached p.  (Brushing up the memory of our Lonavlites: Chug…chug…chug…the train is approaching Lonavla station, but has not reached the station! Sigh!) So simple… Or, is it?

Let’s go easy on the mind now!  One pair of adjacent angles that add up to 180 degrees forms a linear pair; and an angle of 180 degrees is a straight angle. And what about a Null set? It’s a fully empty set.  Talk fractions – and operations on them – and our ‘borderliners’ get the jitters.  Mathematicians speak of a fraction as a part of a whole (part). ¾ is three parts of the four parts that make the whole. Ever heard of a constant variable?  It is a variable whose value cannot be changed once it has been assigned a value.  Equations of motion are the examples that come to mind in this regard.

Statistics, a branch of Mathematics, has come to stay, and this part of Mathematics is finding its way into the syllabus of the lower classes as well.  It tells us about the raw data that is arranged in a random order, and if you wish to interpret/classify it further you have to rearrange it in an ascending or descending order.  Speaking about order and a definite pattern, we arrive at sequences.  Da Vinci code gives you the Fibonacci sequence: 1 - 1 - 2 - 3 - 5 - 8 - 13 - 21 ....  The simplest to understand is of course the AP (Arithmetic Progression) that has a common difference between two successive terms.

Now then?!