How does a cat grin?

My dad is amazing with numbers.  He and his friends used to play math games with each other for fun. That sounds about as much fun to me as getting a paper cut. I have never seen myself as being good at math. When I was around 10 I scored an F on a math test, and my sister famously asked my parents, “What are you going to do to him?”  As worried as I was about what would happen, the answer was they found me a tutor. But I still have anxiety whenever I need to do math in my head.  

One thing that Carroll taught me while studying “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” was that math can be interesting. I have done more active work trying to understand math since starting this show than I have ever cared to do before. Am I a little bitter that it wasn’t taught in a way that connected with me? Maybe.

If you asked me a year ago about Pi I probably could have rattled off something about 3.14 and triangles. But it didn’t really mean anything to me. But while trying to uncover Carroll’s mysteries in Wonderland, it led me down a, well, rabbit hole. You may know that Charles Dodgson (who wrote under the name Lewis Carroll was a mathematician and a logician at Oxford. So how is a logician remembered by a work that most people consider an exercise in the absurd? Well, Carroll just wanted us to find the key to unlock his logic. 

For example, how does a cat grin? Well, the answer is, when it is a catenary. You see, a catenary curve is made when a cord, or rope that is flexible is hung between two points. The gravity pulls the cord down to create a curve that resembles a smile. This also explains how the Cheshire cat’s incorporeal grin appears. This is just one of the puzzles that Dodgson set in front of us. 

The more I read, and the more puzzles I found, the more I wanted to uncover these mathematical ideas that I never quite understood. To help understand some of these concepts, I have studied nature and art and architecture.  Imagine if the kids who nerded out about music could learn math through that lens while the students who really understood numbers could study it with numbers.  

Once upon a time music, math, and astrology were all one concept and could not be understood without one of the other two elements. How did these concepts become separated? If we brought them back together, would a student like me have more confidence with numbers? Would math minded people be more confident with music?  

Here is yet another case of things getting divided and ending up with a subpar result. When we divide things that are meant to be interconnected, everyone loses. Perhaps it is time to start finding connections again?