The Calculus Diaries - Jennifer Ouellette [3]
That single-minded obsession proved to be his downfall. Eventually Marcellus overcame Archimedes’ ingenious defenses, and Roman soldiers swarmed through the city of Syracuse. Historical accounts report that Archimedes was so engrossed in studying a geometric figure he’d drawn in the dust that he barely noticed the chaos around him. A Roman soldier “in quest of loot” marched up to the scholar and demanded that Archimedes accompany him to Marcellus’s tent. Archimedes demurred, saying he wished to finish solving his geometrical problem first: “I beg you, don’t disturb this.” Incensed, the soldier summarily killed him, so that “with his blood he confused the lines of his art.”1
This account of the death of Archimedes provided inspiration centuries later, when a young French girl named Sophie Germain read the story in the late eighteenth century. She concluded that if someone could be so consumed by a geometric problem, then geometry must be the most fascinating subject in the world. So Germain set out to learn it, defying her family’s strictures by studying math in secret under the bedclothes at night. Later she masqueraded as a male student at the École Polytechnique in Paris (girls were not admitted), and by the time she died of breast cancer in 1831, she was a highly accomplished mathematician.2
The soldier who killed Archimedes wasn’t quite so inspired. Perhaps Archimedes reminded him uncomfortably of his high school math teacher, who may have ridiculed the soldier’s failure to grasp the fundamentals of geometric proofs in front of snickering classmates. All that pent-up resentment and frustration boiled over into an impulsive act of rage, making the Greek scholar an early casualty in the longstanding war between jocks and nerds.
Pure conjecture, naturally, but many of us can relate—even more so when we learn that Archimedes came dangerously close to inventing calculus. Two thousand years later, traumatic memories of high school calculus evoke powerfully negative reactions among people of all ages, genders, and backgrounds. Most people would rather be strung up by their thumbs and systematically tortured with sharp, pointy objects than be forced ever again to find the antiderivative of a polynomial. Math in general, and calculus in particular, is something to be avoided like the plague once we leave high school. An episode of the TV series House opens with a group of students taking the AP calculus exam. A boy collapses and is rushed to the hospital. When House is told of the circumstances of the boy’s collapse, he quips, “That’s the way calculus presents.”
So calculus has a formidable reputation. I have always been among those nonmathematical sorts who viewed it with trepidation and preferred to keep a safe distance. In fact, I avoided taking calculus altogether by cleverly skipping out on my senior year of high school for early admission to college. Since I am a science writer who specializes in physics topics, it surprises many people to learn that I have a lingering phobia about math. Chalk it up to my English-major roots, but the sight of even a simple algebraic equation still elicits an involuntary shudder, unless I consciously counteract it.
I am not alone in my ambivalence. My friend Allyson, in particular, seems to be a kindred spirit to that long-ago Roman soldier. “My initial reaction to the word calculus is not unlike a caveman throwing rocks at the moon in ignorance and fear resulting in blind rage,” she confessed when I asked about her aversion to all things math. “There is no such thing as ghosts creeping up behind me on the stairs, but there is such a thing as a polynomial monster, and it has hooked teeth and causes chronic yeast infections, I’m sure.”
Our stubborn resistance to calculus is not entirely rational. Frankly, most of us don’t even know what calculus entails; its reputation for being difficult and unpleasant precedes it. Calculus is quite simple and straightforward in concept; the devil is in the details. Essentially it’s a way of measuring