Of Cabbages and Kings

I discovered something in a very roundabout way recently. Two years ago I wrote a blog post about a fantastic connection one of my AP students made between the act of translation and mathematics.

That post prompted one of my former students, Adam Washington, to write a couple of posts of his own. Adam graduated from Indiana University with his Ph.D. in physics. He is now at the University of Sheffield in England as part of the Polymer Physics Group and has published papers with such fantastic titles as "Porosity of Stöber silica observed by spin-echo small angle neutron scattering," and "Spin Echo Small Angle Neutron Scattering using a continuously pumped 3He neutron polarisation analyser."

Prompted by the post I had written, which was inspired by one of my current students at the time, Adam wrote "Linear Algebra for Linguists", which began to explore a mathematical way of looking at translation. He continued that line of thinking in "Intermediate Vectors for Linguists".

I discovered all this when he referenced his work in a comment to this article I had posted on Facebook.

Connections...one student inspiring a teacher who prompted a former student to combine seemingly vastly different areas of human understanding. No words. I simply have no words. This is teaching. This is education. Teachers and students and inspiration and ideas and discovery. How very sweet and wonderful it is.