Quirks

As I have shared earlier, I count stairs. If I'm not having a conversation with someone and I'm going up or down stairs, it's safe to bet that I'm (silently, thank goodness) counting them as I go. I know another math person that does this too. Also, due to twelve years of dance classes, I occasionally start counting them in eight-counts.

When looking at a digital clock, I often attempt to make true mathematical statements out of the time, i.e. 6:23 is 6=2x3. This started when I was about six years old on a cross country car trip to Illinois. My favorite ones to catch involve square roots. 7:49, yay!

If I'm eating something that comes in individual pieces (like M&M's), I want to chew the same number of pieces on each side of my mouth. So I alternate.

If I step on a crunchy leaf with one foot (which I usually do on purpose, crunching leaves is nice!), I feel funny if I don't also step on a crunchy leaf with the other foot.

In written language, nothing bothers me more than when "less" is used where "fewer" should be. It happens all. the. time. For the record, "fewer" is used if the object of the adjective can be counted. There is less milk in the glass, but there are fewer glasses of milk. (Bold, italic AND large size font, just to emphasize how much I hate that mistake.)

When I play computer solitaire, I line up the cards at the end like this, so that I can put four cards of the same suit in the correct pile in order. I told my husband this, and now when he wins, he lines them up like this and lets me finish.

My spider solitaire quirk is worse. When the cards pile up in the bottom left corner, they have to be in some kind of pattern (black-red-black-red, or black-red-red-black, you get the idea.) If the game goes in such a way that the pattern is messed up, it's entirely possible that I will quit and start a new game.

I'm sure there are more, but quite frankly, I don't want to lose any friends. People can only put up with so much.

Mnemonic fun!

Finals are over, and not a moment too soon. My worst one was for Real Analysis, a proof-intensive math course where we essentially proved that calculus works. (See My Infinity Is Bigger Than Yours for more fun from this class, which, by the way, is a nice spread out TWO SEMESTER COURSE at most schools... but not mine.) I spent most of Saturday studying for this final, a lot of which was getting the specific definitions straight for the main concepts (makes proofs a lot easier when you can quickly and clearly define everything you're talking about). You know what I realized? Most of the important concepts from this class start with the same two letters. Compact, complete, connected, convergent, continuous... I think it's a conspiracy aimed at those of us who remember things better when we can make an acronym out of them.

So this is what my brain did to compensate for the lack of acronymage. (<--Whee! New words!) When I took a break from studying to shower and my eyes landed on my bottle of Olay Complete body wash, my first thought was "Every Cauchy sequence in that bottle of body wash converges to a point also in that bottle!" which I know makes zero sense to non-math-people, but that's the definition of complete.The ease with which my brain made that connection actually irritated me for a second, because I would like to be able to pretend that I think like a normal person. (I know this isn't true, because I also do weird things like count stairs as I go up and down them. I've found other math people who do this too. But I digress.) Once I was finished being irritated, I realized that this was an excellent way to keep all those definitions straight. I went on to picture compact cars with covers that had finite subcovers, and connected trains where the only cars with doors that were both open and closed were the cars that contained everything in the train and the cars that contained nothing.

I'm kind of embarrassed by this.

And at the same time, kind of proud.

Kind of.

It's probably a good thing that I have a three week break for Christmas now.