14 Gallons in Under 15 Minutes: An Adventure in Mental Mathematics
Everyone knows it to be true that excellence with language and excellence with math are mutually exclusive gifts. It is an idea as old as Plato, who sided with the mathematicians by—so the legend goes—writing above the entrance to his Academy the ward and warning: “Let none ignorant of mathematics enter here” (It’s much catchier in Greek). When he got around to imagining his perfect society in his Republic , he went further, having poetry expelled from that imagined realm. Yes, everyone knows one cannot be good with both letters and numbers. But what everyone knows—on this point, as on so many others—is wrong. I begin this meditation with the confession that I am an English professor, with all my degrees in the humanities; and yet, this does not mean that I am a stranger to the ways of numbers. On the contrary, I balan...