West Virginia...with Math!

This is so cool.

The state best known for coal mining has come out with one of the coolest math machines I've ever seen. According to The State Journal Bonita Lawrence, a professor at Marshal University in Huntington, West Virginia, and her students have designed and assembled a "differential analyzer" using Erector Sets. It's Steam Punk meets Texas Instruments. You can see a video of the machine here.

So what is it?

Well, it's machine made of gears, pulleys, widgets and whatnot that actually solves differential equations and draws the solutions. Bonita claims that it can solve some nonlinear equations that calculators just approximate.

And what does this means, exactly?

Bonita gives an amazing, lucid description of differential analysis in the video. She gives an example of her maching taking in information about the velocity and acceleration of a car (the differential equation) and popping out the position of the car (the solution).

Fantastic, right? She never mentions second derivatives or initial values, and yet she described completely to a lay-person what a differential equation and its solution look like.

Why would anyone make this?

Bonita points out that before the age of computers, a machine like this gave mathematicians their first view of a solution to differential equations. Her reasoning for reinventing the wheel was that "there are so many visual learners" and that this contraption gave her students a "visual interpretation of a mathematical equation."

In a heart-warming paean to her students and to people like me, she went on to say, "My personal opinion is that math majors can do anything." I.e. Why build this machine? Because she can.

You can see a much longer interview with this charming woman here.

Brava Dr. Bonita!

P.S. In the book The Emporer's New Mind, Roger Penrose describes the brilliant and important mathematician Alan Turing developing machines just like this before World War II. Turing earned fame for breaking the Enigma Code of the Nazi Germans during the war and then developing the theory behind the "universal computing machine" (you know...the computer). He later was thrown from the Royal Academy of Sciences for being gay and forced to undergo hormone therapy to "fix" him. He took his own life some time after this.

This amazing story is captured in the play "Breaking the Code" by Hugh Whitemore.