The Joys of Calculus

The following is the amazing but true confession of a Trinity senior in Math 31L. I could change my name to protect myself from ridicule, but anyone with half a brain would know that I am writing about myself. (Of course, if I had half a brain, I would not be in this class, as it is a notorious all-purpose "weeder class" that drives overzealous freshmen out of pre-med and engineering with reckless abandon. It could be the leading cause of pre-laws at the University.)

There must be a million reasons for me not to be in this class, where my knowledge of calculus will be measured against that of 350 freshmen just out of high school and AB Calculus. I mean, isn't senior year when we all get to take Intro to Golf and the LSATs and interview at PriceWaterhouseCoopers or Procter and Gamble? Shouldn't I be at Satisfaction every Thursday night, swimming in a $2 BigBeer instead of wading through combined functions?

All my friends laughed and said "Why?" or "Have you lost your mind?" when I told them I was registering for the class last semester-all except one. And he said it was a great idea, that demonstrating competence with high math will look great on an application. He is now a first-year graduate student in Stanford's Department of Political Science. Hopefully, next year, I will join him.

However, until then, I must endure a semester of limits and derivatives. Of course, I have not taken a math course (statistics does not count) since junior year of high school when I bombed pre-calculus. I have forgotten a lot, and I did not learn all that much in the first place.

With all of these worries swirling through my mind, I have slogged through my homework three times a week until Drop/Add (my only venue of escape) closed last week. At one point, in the middle of a rather complicated homework problem, I was taken aback to find myself in quite desperate straits. My calculator had just spit out a number followed by a string of decimals interrupted by a curious miniature E. I looked at that letter for a moment in dazed bewilderment before a neuron which had been dormant since 1995 fired inside my skull, leaving a cloud of dust and myelin. "It's scientific notation!" I exclaimed. "Huzzah!"

Sure, you might scoff at my mocked and archaic jubilance, but let me tell you, there is a secret pleasure that accompanies Math 31 that hardly anyone recognizes. To most undergraduates, who have taken Math 31 in their first semester at the University, along with Chemistry 11 and Biology 25 or some other ridiculously big and bell-shaped course, Math 31 is an unrelenting bore and a difficult one at that. But I, after six semesters of political science and philosophy courses, have experienced a private euphoria, an escape from the enveloping haze of argument that has covered my previous classes in a world of skepticism and uncertainty.

I have rediscovered the pleasure of answers-real concrete solutions, like two plus two equals four, or that the slope of a line tangent to a point on a curve will be equal to the instantaneous slope of that point. Sometimes I find a solution to a problem and, after comparing it to the solutions guide in the appendix, I leap up and pump my fist in the air, letting out a primal yawp. That never happens when I write a paper. My typical process of restless proofreading and hand-wringing leaves me in no condition to celebrate, since I am both exhausted from the intellectual exertion and terrified that I may have somehow neglected a possible counter argument or failed to connect two concepts logically.

Mathematics, in contrast to more rhetorical sciences, is a perfectly closed system, removed from the abstractions and chaos of the real world. It is governed by universal rules. If applied correctly, the answer is certain. Even statistics cannot become more than 95 percent certain of anything.