The Calculus Diaries - Jennifer Ouellette [121]
51
Completion may be threatened by plans to build a tunnel for a high-speed rail under that portion of the city, which could cause structural damage to the cathedral, as well as two other Gaudi landmarks, Casa Batlló and Casa Milà. Such fears are not unwarranted: In 2005, a metro tunnel collapsed and wiped out an entire city block in Barcelona.
52
Technically, this is true only if we are measuring all angles (x) in radians, as opposed to degrees. One radian is equal to 180/π degrees.
53
It’s been said by more than one educator that physicists use fictions all the time in the classroom, since standard introductory textbooks ignore complicating factors such as friction.
54
England had its own tyrant of method and correctness: a seventeenth-century math teacher named Edward Cocker, author of a 1667 textbook called Cocker’s Arithmetick: Being a Plain and Familiar Method Suitable to the Meanest Capacity for the Full Understanding of That Incomparable Art, as It Is Now Taught by the Ablest Schoolmasters in City and Country. This book became the standard for British grammar schools for generations. These days we have the far more succinct Math for Dummies.