The Thrill of Repetition

In most fields of human endeavor, there are a select few people on the frontiers, pushing the boundaries of what can be done and occasionally challenging a paradigm or two. You know -- guys like Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Einstein, and Chuck Norris. These trailblazers do the heavy lifting of our development. Then there are the rest of us, whose lives are dedicated to filling in a corner or two. I fall soundly in the latter camp, although I once had aspirations of the former. Making matters even worse, I find myself immensely excited over stuff the rest of the world takes for granted.

As a demonstration, I spent most of my non-grading time last week writing a piece of computer code to approximate solutions to an equation using Euler's method (the man's name is 'oiler,' by the way -- pronounce it like the first fifteen seconds of this at your own peril). I felt like some sort of savant, despite the fact that no self-respecting person past his or her junior year would ever use this scheme for anything that matters. In defense of arguably the most prolific mathematician of all time, he developed this technique centuries ago, and the method is still a valuable pedagogical tool. Unfortunately, no such argument can be made for me. This pattern repeats; I became similarly ecstatic last fall when I generated code to perform straightforward calculations.

Maybe a part of me enjoys simply playing around with computer programming. After all, I did minor in computer science. I am also a student of a person who gets a charge from things like this. Dr. Page, my undergraduate calculus professor (and in many ways, the model for my teaching style), displayed great pride in a program which seemed to duplicate one of our graphing calculators' built-in commands.

Be careful if you are around me for a long time. It would seem that this disease is communicable. Sandi and I have been participating in Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University for the past several weeks, and part of the package is ninety days of access to his website's budgeting and financial tools. We spent most of Sunday afternoon recreating these tools within an Excel spreadsheet. This followed a Saturday dominated by the license board from Final Fantasy XII. What sort of nerds are we, anyway?

Have a great week, and go buy some Lysol® before you catch the bug!