Discovery creates Wonder

We’ve been focus­ing on won­der and dis­cov­ery quite a bit late­ly and there’s a rea­son for that. Not only does it seem to fit with the sea­sons of spring and sum­mer, but it’s impor­tant. As we con­tin­ue into our high school math­e­mat­ics jour­ney, the temp­ta­tion to focus nar­row­ly on the task at hand is hard to over­come. First there is a les­son on lin­ear equa­tions, then poly­no­mi­als, mul­ti­ply­ing bino­mi­als, fac­tor­ing, and final­ly graph­ing, but we’ve for­got­ten our first love. Why are we on this jour­ney any­way? This is a slip­pery slope (pun intended).

The dif­fer­ence between my high school peers and my cur­rent clas­si­cal­ly edu­cat­ed high school stu­dents mag­ni­fies in this digres­sion. Clas­si­cal­ly edu­cat­ed stu­dents have been taught to focus on the true, good, and beau­ti­ful. They know that it is the good­ness of God that dri­ves us to study Him through the lan­guage of math­e­mat­ics. When we for­get why we are fac­tor­ing poly­no­mi­als, we need to go back — What do we see about God in his cre­at­ed order? He made the pat­terns in poly­no­mi­als con­sis­tent, reli­able, and amaz­ing. For exam­ple, it is with poly­no­mi­als that we dis­cov­er imag­i­nary num­bers! Imag­i­nary num­bers don’t exist, tru­ly. How­ev­er, if you mul­ti­ply two of them togeth­er, the result is a real num­ber, which tru­ly exists. Where else can we take two things that don’t exist and get some­thing that does! How do we even fath­om a God that allows us, equips us even, to see, learn, and dis­cov­er this amaz­ing rela­tion­ship even though He knows we can­not ful­ly com­pre­hend it?

This is the mys­tery that we need to remem­ber exists in even the minut­est math­e­mat­ics prob­lem. Remem­ber each les­son in your high school text start­ed with a philoso­pher ask­ing the biggest ques­tions man can ask : Who is God and how do I know him?