Profile of Mark, a 60's Child of the New Math
Greetings. I was born March 30, 1953, vhich is the basis for my website name of pi365. To explain further, the numeric sequence 33053 begins right at the 365th digit of the mathematical constant pi (for those hazy on your long-ago high school math, that's circumference divided by diameter) counting the initial '3' of pi as digit one, the '1' right after the decimal point as digit two, et cetera. Yes, I am into numbers, and if I was a teen in school today, I'd probably get diagnosed as having high-functioning Asperger's syndrome :-)
March 30, 1953 is also exactly 100 years to the day after the birth of
Vincent van Gogh
For that reason, I'm using the screen name starrynight100 on my Blogger site and on Fantastic Forum, a board focused around discussing a nationally popular (and my favorite) radio show, Coast to Coast AM.
My one childhood brush with future celebrity was as a tenderfoot beginner in a Boy Scout troop (Troop 94 of El Cerrito, California) with John Fogerty, later of Credence Clearwater, and being a participant in his Eagle Scout induction ceremony. What stands out most in my childhood experience, though, was the New Math. As a sixth grader, I was in an experimental class that used yellow soft-bound provisional textbooks put out by the School Mathematics Study Group (SMSG) which did not emphasize the normal long division and such but rather such mathematical concepts as basic set theory and computation in bases other than ten. In base seven, for example, the number 49 (seven squared) is written as 100 and 343 (seven cubed) is written as 1,000. My interest in math over the next several years led me to participate in a wonderful high school summer enrichment program held at the University of California at Berkeley during the years 1967 to 1969. If anyone out there Googles the name of Frantisek Wolf, the founder and organizer of this program, please email me--it's probably the only way we alumni of those summers will now find each other.
Ever since, I have looked for such squares and cubes in life around me, and perhaps for this reason was comfortable with binary and octal, and so was an early adopter of personal computers circa 1980 (my first was a used IMSAI). As my life path progressed further, and my fascination with calendars and date-bearing ephemera came forth, it was a natural that on July 16, 1994 (having just completed a Masters degree in history at the University of North Dakota) I would immediately notice that this day, when the comet fragments of Shoemaker-Levy began striking Jupiter, was the precise seven-squared anniversary of the first atomic bomb test at Alamogordo, and furthermore the exact five-squared anniversary of the launch of the Saturn Five rocket that would carry the first humans to land on the Moon. This remarkable coincidence, in bases other than ten, would lead me to search the Internet for mention of others, such as the well-known story of Pope John Paul II's survival of an assassination attempt, on the exact eight-squared anniversary of the first apparition of the Virgin Mary at Fatima, Portugal. The anniversary is usually mentioned, but only as the 64th, not specifically as the square of eight. Time for some of us New Math survivors to put in our two cents worth!
This interest of mine in such calendar patterns has formed the basis of my artistic sensibilities ever since. Here's link to a poem I wrote in April 1998 titled New Math and to another from February of that year titled Trailing Zeroes.
My date-sorting process on postage stamps and envelope corners with clear postmarks began as an occasional pastime soon after the July 1994 epiphany described above, and picked up momentum during the 1997 Grand Forks flood as something to focus on during our several weeks of evacuation to Minot, ND. I've carried on with the project ever since by sorting rather than just staring at the tube during tv watching time. To read more about this, click here.