Rehan’s Blog 

Well, it has been almost a month since I’ve updated the blog. Annual funding just got over. We funded student groups well over 600,000 USD in money. SLU has over a 100 student groups officially chartered under Student government.

SGA had a 8 hour long funding meeting about this last Wednesday, and another 7 hour long one this Wednesday.We’re done now, and these marathon sessions nearly wiped me out.

Last week, I was part of the SLU math team that competed in the Missouri collegiate Math competition. It was two two and a half hour sessions, one on Thursday and one early Friday morning. I really don’t understand why so many math professors are so chipper in the morning, when most students are groggy and miserable. 8 am classes with Dr. Cantwell vaguely flash into my mind as I write this. somehow, I remember a bit of those differential equations.

The results: my team came in 7th out of around 40 teams and  team B came 9th, which isn’t too bad. Wash U came in 1st and second. Darn Wash U.

Anyway,  the competition turned into a math conference and I by the time I’d recovered from my early morning, I found myself in a rather interesting lecture about the Mathematics of the battle of Trafalgar, where Lord Nelson trounced a much stronger Spanish-French fleet using the very English tactic of divide and conquer. It turns out, the mathematics of the battle supported his strategy.

Math in battle? When math was employed in WW2, Air chief Marshall ‘Bomber’ Harris lost his cool and exploded, “Are we fighting this was with weapons or the slide rule?” Churchill responded, “That’s a good idea, let’s try the slide rule” (I’m paraphrasing, source: A History of Mathematics: From Mesopotamia to Modernity by Luke Howard Hodgkin)