Note to Instructor: This assignment introduces one of Costa and Kallick’s “habits of mind”: “responding with wonderment and awe.”
Assignment:
Brainstorm: When was the last time you were struck or overcome by wonder or awe? (If you’re not sure what a word means, take a moment to look it up.) Take 3-5 minutes to write your ideas.
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Listen/Read: Listen to this short podcast episode, “To the Curious and Prepared Mind, Something Dull Becomes Interesting” (2 minutes). The speaker, Gretchen Rubin, studies happiness and habits.
Click the “play” button towards the top of the webpage. You can also read the transcript of the podcast below:
The famous mathematician G. H. Hardy wrote a memoir called A Mathematician’s Apology (Amazon, Bookshop). In it, he tells a story about a visit he made to Srinivasa Ramanujan, another brilliant mathematician with whom he collaborated. Ramanujan was in the hospital, dying, and Hardy went to see him. He recalls:
I remember once going to see him when he was lying ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. “No,” he replied, “it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.”
Ramanujan was correct. 1729 is a number that can be written as 1 cubed + 12 cubed and 9 cubed + 10 cubed. There’s no smaller integer that can be written as the sum of two cubes. To this day, this kind of number is called a “Hardy-Ramanujan number” or “taxi-cab number.” Only six other taxi-cab numbers have been found.
I love this story, partly because it’s such an odd conversation to have—the kind of small talk that only two mathematicians would find themselves having.
And partly because it shows that a curious, engaged mind, prepared with knowledge, can look out at the world and find fascination in situations that, to the less well-informed, seem quite dull.
Note: Write down any big ideas from the podcast. You may want to listen or read a few times to decide which ideas are most helpful to you.
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Reflect: Write 3-5 sentences reflecting on your experience and the podcast episode. What connections, if any, can you find between your own past experience of being awestruck and the experience Rubin describes in her podcast? What lessons from this story could you carry into a future experience?
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