When I see numbers in fiction that are in some kind of mathematical relationship with each other, I reflexively check the math. (Well, for basic math\/arithmetic, anyway.)<\/p>\r\n
Like, if a story says \u201cThey traveled at 500 mph from California to Japan, arriving in 45 minutes,\u201d then I think, Hmm, it\u2019s 5,000+ miles from California to Japan, so if they\u2019re traveling at 500 mph, the trip would take 10+ hours. Wait, the text says it would take only 45 minutes! This text is WRONG!!!<\/i><\/p>\r\n
I\u2019ve done this kind of checking for as long as I can remember. And I\u2019m not sure why.<\/p>\r\n
In almost all cases, the question of whether the math is correct or not makes no difference at all to the story. (Yes, I know, there are some cases where it makes a big difference, but I\u2019m not talking about those cases.) And in most cases, it\u2019s not immediately obvious at a glance whether the math is right or not; if I didn\u2019t take the time to explicitly check, then I wouldn\u2019t know and it wouldn\u2019t matter.<\/p>\r\n
But somehow, I feel the need to check. If the math is right (as it usually is), I suppose I get a small sense of satisfaction\u2014maybe because it reassures me to find that the author\u2019s reality and my reality are in sync and that math works the same for both of us, or maybe just because at some level of my mind, correctness is in itself a virtue. (I recognize that that\u2019s a problematic attitude, and I try not to get carried away with it.) If the math is wrong, I get a small sense of unhappiness, similar to how I feel when I see a typo, because something is wrong<\/em>.<\/p>\r\n If math comes up in a work that I\u2019m editing, then it makes perfect sense for me to check it. But in most cases where I do this kind of checking, I\u2019m not editing, and the work that I\u2019m reading was published long ago; it\u2019s not like I\u2019m going to drop a note to the author or the publisher asking them to fix a story that was published in 1950.<\/p>\r\n So I\u2019m not sure how I got into this habit. I do this checking-the-numbers in non-sf too, and even nonfiction, but I suspect that I picked up the habit from reading a lot of 1940s-1950s sf in which the math is explicitly written out. At this point, I\u2019ve been doing it for so long that it feels completely ordinary to me. I think it was only sometime in the past few weeks that it consciously occurred to me that I don\u2019t really need to check all the math I run into.<\/p>\r\n I generally don\u2019t check advanced math or physics or other fields that I don\u2019t know as well or can\u2019t check as easily. Once in a while, a claim in a story will seem so unlikely to me that I\u2019ll go do some research about it to find out whether it\u2019s true, but that\u2019s a different category of issue; in that case, I\u2019m checking something because I think it might not be true, rather than just out of habit.<\/p>\r\n But for basic math, if I see it in a story, I\u2019ll check it.<\/p>\r\n So now I\u2019m wondering: is this a common habit? Do y\u2019all who like math do this kind of checking as a matter of course? Again, I don\u2019t mean noticing obvious errors, I mean pausing in your reading to do some calculations in order to see whether the numbers given are correct.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[124],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-math"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19112"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19113,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19112\/revisions\/19113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}