What Math Can Teach Us About Juggling, and What The Math of Juggling Can Teach Us About Everything Else
Computers represent humanity's greatest achievement along the border of the analytic and the pragmatic. I have always been interested in where mathematics and the 'real world' meet. The question that seems to drive the latest heights of human understanding wherever I turn is - how can we use mathematics to better understand our environment, more efficiently complete tasks or provide more sophisticated and beautiful solutions to problems that are half-understood but widely believed to be resolved? This interest has informed my career, from an amateur interest in cryptography and network security as a youngster, to the study of logic at university, and now to networking and administration (I also think its why I've had more of a capacity for the discrete side of things and have floundered in calculus). This intersection in computing is widely accepted, but in more common tasks the mathematical approach to problem solving is often discarded for the obsc...