surprise!

This weekend, while Annemarie and Sam were visiting CMU, CMU visited me in the form of a big "portable CMU" event at my church.

My favourite session was with Tim Rogalsky, my old math prof. He talked about chaos theory and Pascal and Fibonacci spirals and nature, and it was great. My favourite tidbit was this thought: Mathematicians often just come up with a new idea of how math could be fun, and then they play with this idea in their heads for years without ever considering how it might be applicable to "the real world." Then, decades or centuries later, somebody discovers that this "useless" idea actually perfectly describes something in the real world that has existed since the beginning of time. The mathematicians had thought they were just inventing nifty games and puzzles and never knew they were inventing a formula that actually describes the way a huge flock of birds flies together.

Tim said he thinks this happens because we are made in the image of God the creator. Our innate ability to create mathematical ideas that later turn out to have been present in the world all along without our knowledge is because we are made the image of a the very same creator who created the world in the first place, so it makes sense that we create ideas that mirror God's ideas. To this I say: NEAT!!!

Also, Tim was invited to preach the sermon in church this morning, and a major theme in his sermon was "Surprise!" Before the service, he handed out colourful scarves to the children and youth (and I nabbed one too), and everytime he said the word "suprise" in his sermon, we were supposed to toss them up in the air. It was an ingenius way to keep the kids paying attention (that, and he had a big jar of candy sitting on the pulpit that he was going to hand out to kids who could tell him how many times he said "surprise" during his sermon), and it really conveyed the joy of "suprise!" without being disruptive because it was silent. At the end of his sermon, Tim closed his eyes and prayed, but I noticed that when he prayed the word "surprise", everyone was still silently throwing the scarves in the air, including me. The whole tossing colourful scarves thing got me totally overstimulated and I was giddy for about an hour after the service. It was marvellous fun!