Monday, November 12, 2007

My Father Studied Ordinary Differential Equations And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt

My husband, the mathematician, has a lot of books with cool graphs and other neat pictures. Ada has formed a special attachment to several of his paperback books, and will grab them from wherever they've been stashed, declaring "these are MY math books!" Ok kid, go crazy with the math books. (Actually, a couple of them are actually books of logic puzzles, but given that she can't read yet, I haven't had the heart to tell her.)

Here's one of her favorites:

ODE book


To amuse Chris and to decorate another of Ada's plain shirts, I copied the design from a book on Ordinary Differential Equations onto a shirt.

10/21/07 ODE shirt


I made two stencils, one for the axes and another for the, um, swirl. (I know that Chris and Stephanie are competing to the be the first to tell me what the right term is.) I was paying attention to centering the whole design, which made me blind to the fact that the swirl does not lay on the axes exactly as they do on the book's image. I still think it turned out alright, even if it makes Ada look like a junior climatologist. Ada likes it, but is so far impervious to my attempts to have her refer to it as "MY math shirt!". I am still working on her.

6 comments:

  1. What a cool shirt! Even if I don't have the faintest inkling what it means.

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  2. I'd call the swirlies "solution curves".
    And I want one of those shirts, but Chris and I would have to make sure that we don't wear them on the same day (provided you make him one, too.)

    It's an awesome shirt. And also awesome that it's ADA's MATH SHIRT.

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  3. Wow! I've never heard so much enthusiasm for math...

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  4. Totally cool. Though I have no idea what it means. Just nice graphics.

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  5. While Stephanie is correct in that they are solution curves, we could more precisely describe the graph as a stable spiral (or spiral sink).

    Just sayin.

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