tilden
Sep 7, 2013
Scholarship / How Nature Works was definitely manna for my inquisitive mind; Questbridge App [6]
Dear Reader,
Please kindly tell me what you think about this essay and how it can be improved. Its 214 words I am working on it to be 200 words.Any advice given will be appreciated.
Prompt:Tell us about a concept or subject that intellectually excites you. Why does it interest you?
"How do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by falling grains of sand?" -Victor Hugo
Whenever I think about it, I always conclude that Per Bak's book: How Nature Works was definitely manna for my inquisitive mind.
As a mere 10th grader who was still finding my feet while graphing Cartesian planes and juggling complex trigonometric ratios, it was not unusual to find the concept of self organised criticality (SOC) discussed in this tome way out of my league. However, in 10 minutes of our fortunate encounter, I was enraptured by the basic concepts and needless to say, I fell in love.
Before long, I had found the similarity between the Devil's staircase-a creation of Bak and no relation of the mountain range in Scotland just in case you thought so- and the evolutionary biology theory of punctuated equilibrium. But what really excited me after weeks of researching fractal graphs, avalanches, negative power laws and SOC's application in financial markets, earthquakes and mass extinctions was the basic concept-how small perturbations could cause unforeseen prodigious changes in relatively gigantic systems.
To be honest, I used to ponder this all my life. Could little me really make a difference in this vast universe? Till today, I never believed math could have the answer!
Dear Reader,
Please kindly tell me what you think about this essay and how it can be improved. Its 214 words I am working on it to be 200 words.Any advice given will be appreciated.
Prompt:Tell us about a concept or subject that intellectually excites you. Why does it interest you?
"How do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by falling grains of sand?" -Victor Hugo
Whenever I think about it, I always conclude that Per Bak's book: How Nature Works was definitely manna for my inquisitive mind.
As a mere 10th grader who was still finding my feet while graphing Cartesian planes and juggling complex trigonometric ratios, it was not unusual to find the concept of self organised criticality (SOC) discussed in this tome way out of my league. However, in 10 minutes of our fortunate encounter, I was enraptured by the basic concepts and needless to say, I fell in love.
Before long, I had found the similarity between the Devil's staircase-a creation of Bak and no relation of the mountain range in Scotland just in case you thought so- and the evolutionary biology theory of punctuated equilibrium. But what really excited me after weeks of researching fractal graphs, avalanches, negative power laws and SOC's application in financial markets, earthquakes and mass extinctions was the basic concept-how small perturbations could cause unforeseen prodigious changes in relatively gigantic systems.
To be honest, I used to ponder this all my life. Could little me really make a difference in this vast universe? Till today, I never believed math could have the answer!