Roots of Unity

Max, why are we abandoning the old blog? Oh well. Anyway, I'll bite and make the first real post.

I was doing some mild Googling yesterday, the contents of which will be apparent in a minute, when I found this blog post by a prospective parent who had been visiting colleges with his daughter, discussing a particular student-directed admissions video he'd seen at one event hosted by an unnamed college. David writes:

The other thing that struck me in the movie was not, I think, intended by its producers. One of the students, explaining how wonderful the school was, described it as undefinable--"like the square root of two."

The square root of two is quite easily defined--it is that number that, multiplied by itself, equals two. The correct term is "irrational," but I don't think that's how he wanted to describe his college. The actual information conveyed by that segment was that at least one student at that college was both mathematically illiterate and mathematically pretentious, and that nobody making the movie knew enough elementary mathematics, or was paying enough attention, to do a retake with the error corrected. I don't think that was the message that the school intended to give to potential students and their parents.

Heh. The video is, of course, this one, and the student is our own Mr. Potter, 55 seconds into the thing.

Putting aside Mr. Friedman's own confusion--the definition he offers is not properly a "definition," since two real numbers meet that criterion--let's focus on the humor for a bit. Though I never discussed the comment with Jerome, I'll assume it was in jest; he held a respectable 89% homework average (yeah, I keep track) in Calc 2 months before the video was filmed, and I assume that an ability to perform trigonometric substitution on integrals like, say, dx/sqrt(9-x^2) belies an understanding of how square roots work, even on non-perfect squares.

But to Mr. Friedman, and the dozen or so commenters on that particular blog entry, this humor isn't just lost; it's outright denied. Of course nobody on that blog knows Jerome, so we shouldn't expect them to know that he's kidding as well. But I think if you showed this video to the average college student at a liberal arts school, they'd recognize that the guy is being facetious. This didn't even occur as a possibility to any of the posters in the ensuing discussion. (In fact, a few rushed to Jerome's defense, getting into a very philosophical--and very incorrect--debate over what "undefinable" means.)

What's up with that? I'm not professing ignorance about the "generation gap," nor am I suggesting that the irony-laden ("laden" might not be strong enough a word for ESU) humor in which we've been steeped is somehow universal. But after the Carl debate on the parents' email list blew up last month, I've been looking into the way that our generation's humor is perceived by the adult world, and I still keep being surprised by the disconnect. It'll be interesting adjusting to this as we start to live our lives among people who, generally, aren't going to laugh at the same things we do anymore. Let's keep this blog around.