Eric the Blue

Uff da, sitting at home nursing a bug and scrolling while my friends play golf on a warm fall day. It seems I “interact” regularly with math-y posts, because my feed has lots of stuff like this

which today is an excuse to stay in a chair instead of cleaning the refrigerator, the bathrooms, and doing the copious laundry of my sportzing kids. Some people have it worse than I. The lede to an interesting Slate article on physicist Richard Feynman:

When famed physicist Richard Feynman and his second wife split in 1956, it made for a quirky newspaper item that was syndicated across the country. “Mrs Feynman won a divorce on cruelty grounds after testifying that her husband worked calculus problems all day,” the copy read. He did math “as soon as he arose, while he drove his car,” even “while lying in bed at night.” When he wasn’t doing that, he was playing drums, which “made a terrific noise.” If she tried to talk to him, he said she was interrupting his work. She got alimony; he got the bongos.

Algebra is more my speed. In the above problem, let’s say that the big rectangle is W x L. Then the one with an area of 25 m² is W x (L-18) and the one with an area of 32 m² is W x (L-16). You can then expand these expressions to WL – 18W = 25 and WL – 16W = 32 to obtain what math books call a “system of equations.” It’s nice that both have a WL since we can eliminate it by subtracting term-by-term, yielding 2W = 7 and W = 7/2. Now it’s basically just number grinding: 7/2 x (L – 18) = 25 means that L is 176/7 and the area of the big rectangle is thus 7/2 x 176/7 = 88. (Remember that satisfying school sensation when your solution is a “nice” number, not some crazy-ass decimal, which would be a sure sign that you have screwed up?) The problem asks for the area of the shaded region, so subtract the sum of the two given parts (32 + 25 = 57) from 88: 31 m². (The drawing obviously isn’t to scale.)

Last note on Feynman’s divorce. I suspect the odd details owe something to family law in the days before “no-fault divorce.” If his wife wanted out in 1956, she probably had to prove that there had been either adultery, abandonment, or cruelty on the part of Feynman. Kind of crazy when you think about it: no doubt in lots of cases there had been adultery–but only on the part of the party suing for divorce. That Don Draper was a whore-dog would not have helped his family court petition. Anyway, the law required that the last act of cooperation between divorcing couples might be to conspire together to tell tales, improbable or embellished but not incriminating, to the family court in order to establish “cruelty.” The odd thing about Feynman’s case, as described in the Slate piece, is that his wife alleged physical abuse–in which case there would have been no need to complain about his drums or his penchant for working calculus problems. But the evidence for Feynman being (as my mom used to say) “a little different” would have been stronger than the evidence for him being a wife-beater.