Sunday, January 10, 2016

Callum and Maths



I haven't got around to describe Callum's fascination with maths this year. If anything it has increased.  His Beyond Visible course had a segment where they had to do the maths enrichment prep for maths olympiad - Gauss section. They weren't allowed to get any help from anyone, so Callum spent a lot of time staring at whiteboards and moving things around as he got the right answers.
He was able to share his solutions with people, so he also spent a fair bit of time with me and with his grandparents taking us through the various problems.

In our stopover in Bangkok airport on the way to our holiday, Callum also grabbed the serviette and tried to write out his equation for the time it takes for something to fall from a height, depending on its horizontal velocity, as well as the gravitational force on whatever planet you happen to be at the time.

And in quiet moments in the bus on our holiday, Callum spent some time musing on relativity, trying his various equations out on me, to see whether I thought they were correct. It seems we have less time than we thought before he overtakes us  - the combination of Grandma and Grandpa (with multiple maths and physics degrees between them, albeit more than 50 years ago) is being stretched to its limit.

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