A Note from Denny:

Denny in the classroom

Music, Light, Disease, Human Behavior, and Mathematics

I remember thinking as an 8 year-old kid fifty-some years ago that:

*Music can make people happy

*That light can cure disease and change Thing A into Thing B

*If a person can understand mathematics he or she can understand, and maybe even control how the universe works.

So my life’s ambition was to learn about music and light and mathematics. I got off to a slow and rocky start.

I think the first 45 rpm single I bought was when I was 10 years old. It was Bobby Rydell’s “Wild One.” I got it at the record store with a dollar my uncle gave me for Christmas. The store was a regular looking store a few doors down from the Von’s supermarket. I remember walking inside the store to a counter. On the wall just behind the counter was what I thought must have been 500 slots in which 45 rpm records were stored. The guy behind the counter seemed ancient and I thought “this man has probably never heard of the song I want.” Thinking back now, he was probably in his 20’s and worked in that store to get gas money for his ‘55 Chevy. He knew what I wanted and retrieved it from the Wild One slot and I paid my $1.00. I played that record over and over and never got tired of hearing it. I still buy tunes. Now I buy them from the Apple iTunes Store or stores like Streetlight Records where one can find non big-record company CDs. The iTunes tunes are only 99¢. The CD’s I get are $10 and less. I have a lot of tunes. They make me happy.

The thing about the capabilities of light I still believe. In college I took a physics class to find out about light. Those physics labs were 3 hours long and I had to get up early in the morning to get to them. I couldn’t get up by 10:00AM so I thought I would have to learn about light some other way. I’m still trying to learn about light. But I have come to accept that the world is filled with lots of people smarter than me and I am hoping that some of them will learn enough about light to control it and make it do good things for us.

I graduated (just barely) from high school in January 1966. Some great teachers were responsible for getting me through. I learned how to write a little and I read Keats and Shelly and the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. I learned how to write proofs in my geometry class. Some awful teachers knocked me on my ass and nearly killed my spirit. An algebra teacher told us that √25=5 and -5. Its not. I got a “D” in algebra the first time I took it and an “F” the second time I took it. Good grief!

When we got out of high school, my best friend Gary and I started junior college. We flunked out 3 semesters in a row. It was not our fault. Gary had a car and he drove us to school each morning. I don’t understand how it could happen, but every time we pulled into the school parking lot, the Mama’s and the Papa’s would come on the radio and we would have to go to the beach. It was some cosmic force that pulled us to the beach at Santa Monica. So much for college.

It was 1967-68 and the draft was on. I joined the navy. The navy made a diesel engine mechanic out of me and sent to the Mekong Delta for 12 months. I think I grew up a lot in that 12 months. When I got out of the navy, I somehow got accepted to Cal State University, Long Beach. I had a different set of priorities then than those I had in and just after high school. CSULB had many great instructors and mathematics faculty who knew that √25 was just 5 and not -5. They made a mathematician out of me. I enjoyed my time so much in school that I stayed. I now teach mathematics at a two-year college in the Silicon Valley.

I still think music makes people happy. I still think light can cure disease. I still think that learning and understanding mathematics can help us understand and even maybe control the universe in which we live.

I would like to write articles and hear your thoughts about music, about light, about human behavior and about mathematics. I’m denny at dennymath.com.