Full Disclosure

I was just writing someone and referenced a class called “World of Math”. This is not actually a made up class. This is a class I took in 7th grade. World of Math or WOM for those of us in the know was a class taught by a Swedish guy to a bunch of math geeks. And I took this class willingly. We made a bunch of multi-sided shapes like the dodechahedron. (Twelve sides) Or perhaps you’re familiar with the icosahedron? You know, that’s the 20 sided shape that’s the big die used in Dungeons & Dragons when figuring out what your character will be(oops! I’ve said too much)(I think there’s a secret code among those geeks when you use or hear a word that only a D&D geek could know like ‘encumbrance’.) We made these out of paper. And we also made tesellations. There’s are the shapes that can repeat endlessly. For instance, wallpaper. It’s full of them. M.C. Escher is famous for them(see the pic). And we’d solve all sorts of fun logic problems. You know the ones, the ones that go, “Eddie and Simone like Rhea and Simone and Rhea like Sam. But Sam doesn’t like Eddie. If they all have to be in boats together, who’s in which boats?” Somewhere along the line though,I started to reject my WOM past! I decided fervently that I wasn’t going to be a nerd. For the previous few years, I had taken to a habit of buttoning all of my buttons all the way up. You can see this in school pictures from probably 1984-1987. I’m certain that in 8th grade, the buttons come way down. Plus I didn’t take WOM II. Which my other WOM friends were trying to cajole me into taking. I put my D&D books way in the back of the closet. I quit Boyscouts. I decided not to go to Thomas Jefferson, the science and math magnet school(Nerd Tech as it was known at my middle school). But you know what? I still doodle tesellations when I’m on the phone. I still like computers. I still like those logic puzzles. WOM still lives! The lesson of Dom Edge-Nissen have not been in vain! The nerd lurks within…