Maths and other things

 I'm often surprised by today's children who, upon being asked what they enjoy at school, frequently reply 'Maths'.  I suspect this has much to do with technology and enlightened teaching methods sadly unavailable in my youth.   My Father worked with numbers for most of his life and rather misguidedly had ambitions for me to do  the same. He was flogging a dead horse.  With his Mercury conjuct Neptune in Leo trine his Mars in Aries, maths was instinctual to him and he could add columns of figures in his head with the facility of an idiot savant.  Not so his Saturn return eldest child! Whereas we had so much in common, he and I, my Mercury in Pisces ~ renowned for its stupidity, was poor Dad's Waterloo!   His terrible fixity of purpose, compounded by a square of Saturn in Scorpio to Mercury, drove him to demand that my primary school should set me maths homework every night, which he would supervise. My desperate attempts to please would dissolve into Pisces tears at his impatience and my inept fumblings at comprehension would drive him to despair! Then we would both lose our fiery tempers and all was lost . I hated maths with a passion after this and escaped it whenever possible. I always enjoyed geometry however and my long-suffering teachers were often bewildered by this anomaly in an otherwise hopeless case.   Of course the truth of it was that Dad didn't know geometry and I liked drawing. Geometry offered  useful drawing techniques, it was beautiful in a way that mathematics could have been without the emotional trauma.  Years passed, my maths never improved much but strangely blossomed when I took up astrology around my Saturn return. My Saturn -  only ten degrees away from my Father's - is trine  the guilty Mercury in Pisces so I suddenly found myself working out proportional logarithms to calculate lunar progressions and converting obscure daylight saving systems to sidereal time, both without benefit of a calculator. Dad would have been so pleased had he known, but of course you don't mention astrology in a Catholic household do you?  How's your mathematical ability? What's the astrology?
      Here are a few Mercury in Pisces things and some other things from the last week.

                                

  Research has shown that in speaking about their work, mathematicians use the words 'elegance', 'truth',and 'beauty' more than everyone else combined.

  Everything you've learned in school as 'obvious' becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe, there's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines......

                                Buckminster Fuller

' THE MOST BEAUTIFUL EXPERIENCE IS THE MYSTERIOUS.. IT IS THE SOURCE OF TRUE ART AND SCIENCE'

                           Albert Einstein    

 


           ' When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it to be wrong.'

                       Buckminster Fuller

      


  'I saw, as one might see the transit of Venus, a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus.  I saw exactly how it happened...but it was after dinner and I let it go,'

  Winston Churchill  (My Early Life, 1930)                                                              

   'Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves and it is tiresome for children to be forever explaining things to them.'

             Antoine de St Exupery