Probably because I was a total zero in math at school, I kind of developed some slow learner curiosity and admiration for it. Do not think I got better meanwhile, altough I recently found a DATAMAN educational toy calculator manufactured by Texas Instruments in the late 1970s that works absolutely perfect and should (in theory) help practice my mathematical tables, train my slowly decaying brain to guess numbers, and practice arithmetics. But truly my first introduction to how a mathematician sees the world (and it was an amazing opportunity) was via a book by Ian Stewart called Nature’s Number, published in 1995 and available at the local British Council library. Read it just before applying at the Art History department in Bucharest, and oh boy, was it a treat.
Other than that it was just mathematical puzzles and games via the collected column by Martin Gardner (to whom I think I owe it to actually being able to listen to videos like the one above – besides the valuable fact that Alin Rautoiu makes it an incredibly entertaining introduction into both math and coding and drawing!). This talk is great because it shows you in real time what you can do with vectors and how helpful and manipulable they are.
What is a vector? How do you formalize it? What is a vector geometrically vs arithmetically?
Anyway, for me or anyone interested in these things will probably feel much more at ease when encountering them in a rather abstruse philosophical or metaphysical jargon and context – namely, taken out of its initial mathematical or even physicalist background, the“vector character” (as opposed to the scalar quantities) has a really important role to play in AN Whiteahead event-based processual thinking and cosmology, when prehensions are mentioned, etc. A prehension (for Whitehead) is not self-contained; it is always tendential, always refers to an external world and thus has “vector character”. ANW also makes a point that the scalar was dominant in Newtonian physics, while the vector (for him) is closer to our lived reality (he was always combating the bifurcation of nature – the split btw clorphyle molecules inside the leaf and their green color perception by our eyes – for short altough his most important work evolved about the bifurcation of Nature).
TimeSpace Warps 