Naugatuck Valley Community College
THE LEGEND OF THE MATH BOMBER Anthony C. Brown* It makes me want to scream. Anytime I look at it, I can feel it mocking me --the large stack of homework peeking at me, most of it math assignments. It had gotten tall enough where the papers started to lean but just wouldn’t fall yet. It looks like a flower heavy with dew. I feel my head leaning and following the fall. “Get out of here. You are going to be late.” My mom snaps me back to reality. I throw a sheet over the pile and run out the door. Here I am in 6th grade, and I would rather hang out with my friends. I know I am going to hear about it from my teacher. Just hope he is cool about it and doesn’t call my mom. His name was Richard P. Reed. He had some advanced degree in mathematics, and boy did those stereotypes fit: thick glasses, unusually large teeth, slender frame that slouched slightly. Of course, all the kids made fun of him. I did too, but he ignored all of those childish things. The only thing that mattered to him was math, like it was his personal mission. “I see you are falling behind on your assignments. You are talented, but you have to apply yourself.” He handed me some extra credit. He wasn’t a total jerk. He seemed to figure out how I think. I loved to flip things around in my head. One thing that I was good at in math was fractions. The first thing I always thought about were pizza pies. Two different fractions could both represent half a pie; one would just have more slices than the other. From fractions I enjoyed their close cousins, decimal numbers. Decimals always made me think about money. Four quarters made up a dollar. So 1/4 of a dollar was 25 cents. This never gets old in my head. I always got the correct change at the store. The coolest trick I learned recently was flipping fractions and decimals together. Ok so 1/1 is 1. Now 1/10 is equal to 0.10. Let’s get crazy and look at 1/0.10. It is the same as 1/(1/10). So now flip the fraction in the denominator (bottom of the fraction), multiply it by the numerator (top of the fraction). So 1/(1/10) is the same as 1 * (10/1), which is equal to 10. 31
