Rubbing Shoulders with Newton: A Story of Serendipity
How, as a trained musician, I became a published mathematician
“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” — Isaac Newton (1643–1727)
I was never a math genius. I knew kids in high school who were magically good at math, for whom digesting abstract concepts seemed as easy as counting petals on a poppy. I was not one of them. I did okay. I made sloppy mistakes and had to work at it. Thankfully though, I was never afraid of the subject.
(Note: Friend and fellow science writer Cole Frederick and I have started a new publication called “Science Spectrum” here on Medium where we will now be publishing our stories. Please consider following our new pub to support our efforts!)
Late Night Entertainment
At the end of a perfectly average day, as the 1990s were coming to a close, I was lying in bed late one night with a pad and pencil in hand, my girlfriend fast asleep beside me. It might sound strange, but to relax my mind I started thinking about how I might express…
