WEDNESDAY, JULY 8

Clyde Yoshida, one of the best teachers in the country, is writing a book that will be a valuable resource for high school math teachers. Over coffee this morning he asked me to be on the lookout for photo subjects that might have a math connection. On my bike ride home from Starbucks I saw a patch of wild grape leaves which seemed to me to be an example of something in nature that cannot be analyzed mathematically. Later I came across a protea that has about it a regularity that seemed to me to be a cinch for mathematical analysis and explanation. When I got home, I took another look at the book Chaos by James Gleick in which I found a suggestion that I may be wrong about the grape leaves. Gleick describes a way of seeing order and pattern in the jumble of grape leaves where I observed only the random, the erratic, the unpredictable... the chaotic. He quotes Douglas Hofstdler: “It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order--and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.”

I will leave to Clyde the mathematical explanation of the chaos of the grape leaves and the more apparent mathematical order of protea blossoms and jimson buds.