Well, that wasn't the most productive of weeks. I didn't get to everything I wanted to do. The weather was great with sunny days in the low 90s on average so I spent a lot of time outside reading. I did complete my goals for Duolingo and the Algebra class. Reading about Hypatia, however, made me more intrigued to learn more about her so I only have a little bit of a draft for a blog post on her. The rest will have to wait for when I finish reading another book on her. What I did get a jump on was
The Unfinished Game by Keith Devlin. It is a really interesting albeit brief account of the correspondence that Pierre de Fermat and Blaise Pascal had in the mid 1600s. They were trying to solve
"the problem of the points", a then unsolved issue involving probability theory and games of chance when a game is interrupted with no plan of resuming. How do you fairly award points and decide who the victor is? It is quite fascinating to see how the best mathematical minds of the time struggled with something that anyone with a grasp on basic probability now can solve fairly efficiently.
Next week will be nasty. I'm filling in at my brother's pizza shop while a couple of his employees are on vacation, so I won't have much time to work on the studies. The plan is to get as far ahead in the Algebra course as possible so I can complete it by the end of the month. There's only about 6 more weeks until school starts and I'm starting to get antsy.
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