The students were sitting in the shelter waiting for their respective buses.
One said to the other, “Did you know that the coefficient of linear expansion is the rate of change of unit length, per unit degree change in temperature?”
His friend smirked. “Oh! I’m sure it is.”
“It is.”
“I wouldn’t know, but there again you probably wouldn’t get too excited if I told you that Antonio Vivaldi, the Italian composer was called the Red Priest because he was also a priest and he had red hair.”
“No, I wouldn’t, but I might think you’re making it up.”
“I’m not, you know.”
“OK. Consider this. Currently, we’re learning about the square roots of negative numbers. Zero has one square root, which is 0. An imaginary number, when squared, gives a negative result. I mean, how cool is that?”
“Yes, OK. It’s a case of you with science versus me with art, I suppose. What if I told you that Vincent van Gogh only ever sold one of his paintings, or that it took Leonardo da Vinci fourteen years to complete the Mona Lisa?”
“Maybe, but I think it’s far more significant that the Fibonacci sequence states that each number in the sequence is the sum of the two numbers that precede it, and that the spiral shapes of sunflowers follow the Fibonacci sequence.”
“OK. What about the fact that the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir had such debilitating rheumatoid arthritis in his hands that he had to lash a brush to his fingers in order to paint.”
“Sure, that’s sad, but how about the Riemann Hypothesis, the biggest and most mysterious mathematical problem that deals with the distribution of prime numbers that has never been solved.”
What if I told you that Jean-Baptiste Lully, the French music conductor, who used a staff instead of a baton, hit his toe with it, got gangrene and eventually died of blood poisoning.
“How about Euler’s identity, regarded as the most beautiful equation because it encompasses the five neutral constants in mathematics.”
“Hah! As amazing as that is, we’re going to have to agree that art is subjective while science is objective, and call it quits.”
“OK, but why call it quits?”
“Because this is my bus. See you tomorrow.”
