Recently, I revised the abstractmath.org article on pattern recognition. Doing that that prompted me to write about my own experiences with patterns. Recognizing patterns is something that has always delighted me: it is more of a big deal for me than it does for many other people. That, I believe, is what led me into doing research in math.

I have had several experiences with déjà vu, which is the result of pattern recognition with one pattern hidden. That will be a separate post. I expect to post about my experiences in recognizing patterns in math as well.

Patterns in language

As a teenager I was a page in the Savannah Public Library. There I discovered grammars for many languages. The grammars of other languages are astonishingly different from each other and are full of obscurities that I love to detect. Until I went to college, I was the only person I knew who read grammars for fun.

I am using the word “grammar” in the sense that linguists use it: patterns in our speech and writing, mostly unnoticed, that help express what we want to say)

The word “grammar” is also used to mean rules laid down by the ruling classes about phrases like “between you and I” and the uses of “whom”. Such rules primarily divide the underprivileged from the privileged, and many will disappear when the older members of the privileged class die (but they will think of new ones).

Grammar-induced glee

Russian

I got pretty good at reading and speaking Russian when I was a student (1959-62), but most of it has disappeared. In 1990, we hosted a Russian cello student with the Soviet-American Youth Orchestra for a couple of days. I could hardly say anything to him. One time he noticed one of our cats and said “кошка”, to which I replied “два кошки” (“two cats”). He responded by correcting me: “две кошки”. Then I remembered that the word for “two” in Russian is the only word in the language that distinguishes gender in the plural. I excitedly went around telling people about this until I realized that no one cared.

Spanish

Recently I visited a display about the Maya at the Minnesota Science Museum that had all its posters in English and Spanish. I discovered a past subjunctive in one of the Spanish texts. That was exciting, but I had no one to be excited with.

The preceding paragraph is an example of a Pity Play.

Just the other day our choir learned a piece for Christmas with Spanish words. It had three lines in a row ending in a past subjunctive. (It is in rhyming triples and if you use all first conjugation verbs they rhyme.) Such excitement.

Turkish

During the Cold War, I spent 18 months at İncirlik Air Base in Turkey. Turkish is a wonderful language for us geeks, very complicated yet most everything is regular. Like a computer language.

I didn’t know about computer languages during the Cold War, although they were just beginning to be used. I did work on a “computer” that you programmed by plugging cables into holes in various ways.

In Turkish, to modify a noun by a noun, you add an ending to the second noun. “İş Bankası” (no dot over the i) means “business bank”. (We would say “commercial bank”.) “İş” means “business” and “bank” by itself is “banka”. Do you think this is a lovably odd pattern? Well I do. But that’s the way I am.

A spate of spit

We live a couple blocks from Minnehaha Falls in Minneapolis. Last June the river flooded quite furiously and I went down to photograph it. I thought to my self, the river is in full spate. I wondered if the word “spate” came from the same IE root as the word “spit”. I got all excited and went home and looked it up. (No conclusion –it looks like it might be but there is no citation that proves it). Do you know anyone who gets excited about etymology?

Secret patterns in nature

All around us there are natural patterns that people don’t know about.

Cedars in Kentucky

For many years, we occasionally drove back and forth between Cleveland (where we lived) and Atlanta (where I had many relatives). We often stopped in Kentucky, where Jane grew up. It delighted me to drive by abandoned fields in Kentucky where cedars were colonizing. (They are “red cedars,” which are really junipers, but the name “cedar” is universal in the American midwest.)

What delighted me was that I knew a secret pattern: The presence of cedars means that the soil is over limestone. There is a large region including much of Kentucky and southern Indiana that lies over limestone underneath.

That gives me another secret: When you look closely at limestone blocks in a building in Bloomington, Indiana, you can see fossils. (It is better if the block is not polished, which unfortunately the University of Indiana buildings mostly are.) Not many people care about things like this.

The bump on Georgia

The first piece of pattern recognition that I remember was noticing that some states had “bumps”. This resulted in a confusing conversation with my mother. See Why Georgia has a bump.

Maybe soon I will write about why some states have panhandles, including the New England state that has a tiny panhandle that almost no one knows about.

Minnesota river

We live in Minneapolis now and occasionally drive over the Mendota Bridge, which crosses the Minnesota River. That river is medium sized, although it is a river, unlike Minnehaha Creek. But the Minnesota River Valley is a huge wide valley completely out of proportion with its river. This peculiarity hides a Secret Story that even many Minnesotans don’t know about.

The Minnesota River starts in western Minnesota and flows south and east until it runs into the Mississippi River. The source of the Red River is a few miles north of the source of the Minnesota. It flows north, becoming the boundary with North Dakota and going by Fargo and through Winnipeg and then flows into Lake Winnipeg. Thousands of years ago, all of the Red River was part of the Minnesota River and flowed south, bringing huge amounts of meltwater from the glaciers. That is what made the big valley. Eventually the glaciers receded far enough that the northern part of the river changed direction and started flowing north, leaving the Minnesota River a respectable medium sized river in a giant valley.

The Mendota Bridge is also one of the few places in the area where you can see the skyscrapers of Minneapolis and of St Paul simultaneously.

Music

Baroque music

I love baroque music because of patterns such as fugues, which I understood, and the harmony it uses, which I still don’t understand. When I was 10 years old I had already detected its different harmony and asked my music teacher about it. She waved her hands and declaimed, “I don’t understand Bach.” (She was given to proclamations. Once she said, “I am never going out of the State of Georgia again because in Virginia they put mayonnaise on their hamburgers!”)

Some baroque music uses a ground bass, which floored me when I first heard it. I went on a rampage looking for records of chaconnes and passacaglias. Then I discovered early rock music (Beatles, Doors) and figured out that they sometimes used a ground bass too. That is one of the major attractions of rock music for me, along with its patterns of harmony.

Shape note music

Some shape note tunes (for example, Villulia), as well as some early rock music, has a funny hollow sound that sounds Asian to me. I delight in secretly knowing why: They use parallel fifths.

The Beatles have one song (I have forgotten which) that had a tune which in one place had three or four beats in a row that were sung on the same pitch — except once, when the (third I think) beat was raised a fourth. I fell in love with that and excitedly pointed it out to people. They looked at me funny. Later on, I found several shape note tunes that have that same pattern.

Links

Pattern recognition. Abstractmath.org article.

Syntax trees in mathematics. G&G post

Liberal-artsy people G&G post

Explaining math. G&G post.

Pattern recognition in understanding math. G&G post.

Red cedars in Wikipedia (juniperus virginiana).

Why Georgia has a bump

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