I’d been hoping to get back into longer-form essays. And then the calculations I meant to do on one problem turned out more complicated than I’d wanted. And they’re hard to square with the approach I used in some earlier work. Not that the results I was looking at were wrong, mind, just that an approach I’d used as “convenient for this sort of problem” turned inconvenient here.
So while I have the whole piece back in the shop for re-thinking, which is harder than even thinking, let me give you some other stuff to read. Or look at. One is from regular Singaporean correspondent MathTuition88. If you know anything about topology it’s because you’ve heard about Möbius strips. Surfaces with a single side are neat, and form the base of 95 percent of all science fiction stories in which the mathematics is the fantastic element. Klein bottles are often mentioned as a four-dimensional analogue to the Möbius strip, a solid object with no distinguishable interior or exterior. And a Klein bottle can be divided into two Möbius strips. MathTuition88 showcases a picture about how to turn two strips into a bottle. Or at least the best approximation of a bottle we can do; the actual Klein bottle is a four-dimensional structure and we can just make a three-dimensional imitation of the thing.
For something a bit more vector-analytic Joe Heafner’s Tensor Time has an essay about vectors. It’s about Heafner’s dislike for the way some vector problems are presented. Some common and easy ways to solve vector equations lead to spurious solutions that have to be weeded out by ad hoc reasoning; can’t we do better? Heafner argues that we can and should. The suggested alternative looks a little stuffy, but as often happens, spending more time on the setup means one spends less time confused later on. Worth pondering.
And this is a late addition, but I couldn’t resist.
Now I have a new favorite first chapter for a calculus text.
nebusresearch 
Thank you for visiting Joseph
Sorry it has taken me so long to get back to you
But I know you understand
As Sheldon Always
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Oh yes. Nothing you ever need to apologize for. I don’t check in on everyone often enough myself. Just glad you’re here and basically all right.
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