Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

I finally got around to seeing a neurologist who thinks I may have multiple sclerosis and I had a battery of MRIs last week done to look for lesions in my brain or problems with my spinal cord that account for those pesky symptoms I've been having.

I don't have a diagnosis yet and the anxiety and stress of waiting for that phone call alone is causing another flare up of whatever it is that I have.

The optimism of the people around me makes me cranky, "You know there's a lot of people with MS that live to old age." Yeah, and there's a lot that don't. As far as I can tell if this were a game of roulette there is one empty chamber, four chambers with rubber bullets, and one chamber with a lead bullet. I am not amused.

I was going to post how I am just not that interested in math any more, or really much of anything since I'm having a lot of difficulty concentrating in general, and more specifically with a mystery diagnosis hanging over my head the anxiety alone is disruptive, but at any rate, a couple of days ago I did read a chapter in David Berlinski's book "Infinite Ascent" about how Galois Theory explains why the quintic is unsolvable and it got me motivated to want to learn (not to be confused with putting out the effort to actually learn) abstract algebra again.

Related to that, there is an interesting proof in Frank Allen's Algebra that I was dismissive of the first time I saw it and now, after finding out what the formal defintion of a normal subgroup is, I wonder if there might not be more to it. Allen proves that "d-x+x=d" for the real numbers. The whole thing led to a neat discussion, at my house not in Allen, about graphing the solutions to the "roots of unity". I just don't remember discussing that all in any class I ever took and it's neat stuff. I'm pretty sure that it never came up because to graph it properly requires knowing polar coordinates and de Moivre numbers which I never got around to. And this is all a round-about way of saying that I now have a more personal reason to work through Gelfand's Trig than I did before. Although I just need to see how things are going to go in the next few weeks.

Finally, for those with a classical education bent, you may enjoy "Lapses in Mathematical Reasoning". It's an English translation of a Russian book from the 1950's. It is a collection of 80 false proofs that are at the high school level and you read through the solution to some problem and spot the fallacy. Some of them just reflect run of the mill mistakes and some of them lead to interesting discussions about deeper issues, long-winded answers are at the end of every chapter. At any rate, as you can see by the table of contents the authors of the book chose to extend Aristotle's refutations to sophisms of a mathematical nature which gives it a very philosophical feel that I had a lot of fun with. The chapter on arithmetical errors was not as good as the others since they relied on pecularities of algorithms that we don't use any more.