Time Capsule
Before I got my Kindle for Christmas over a year ago, I used to grab a few books from our storage to bring back to China with me. Partly this was to have a few old books that I might want to reread, and partly this was just to establish some small sense of familiar in my surroundings.
One book I brought and shelved was The Brother Karamazov. A paperback I received for Christmas in college, I haven't read it more than fifteen years. The other day I was looking on our bookshelves for something to read instead of buying another book for my Kindle. I chose this.
Since I didn't have to read this book for a class the pages are mostly free of markings, though there is an occasional underline that I couldn't resist, the significance of which was important then but lost on me now. However, the back cover I apparently used to write something very important down in a pinch.
Cauchy's Integral Formula. Clearly when I wrote this down I wasn't in class, because I would have had a notebook with me. I must have been caught during some spare time, and all I had on me was Dostoyevsky. I don't even remember if I had been explaining it to a classmate or had it explained to me. Over fifteen years ago, though, it was clearly urgent enough to record in this unrelated book.
What I would not have known then, but know now, was that this formula would end up being very important to me in my eventual professional career. When I would build magnetic models of motors in a boundary element software, I could use Cauchy's formula to check my parameters and assumptions. Fortunately, I only needed to construct a nearly closed curve in the right place and the program would calculate the value of the integral for me.
Of course, today all of these incarnations of myself are distant memories of which I am occasionally reminded when I stumble upon such unintentional time capsules.
One book I brought and shelved was The Brother Karamazov. A paperback I received for Christmas in college, I haven't read it more than fifteen years. The other day I was looking on our bookshelves for something to read instead of buying another book for my Kindle. I chose this.
Since I didn't have to read this book for a class the pages are mostly free of markings, though there is an occasional underline that I couldn't resist, the significance of which was important then but lost on me now. However, the back cover I apparently used to write something very important down in a pinch.
Cauchy's Integral Formula. Clearly when I wrote this down I wasn't in class, because I would have had a notebook with me. I must have been caught during some spare time, and all I had on me was Dostoyevsky. I don't even remember if I had been explaining it to a classmate or had it explained to me. Over fifteen years ago, though, it was clearly urgent enough to record in this unrelated book.
What I would not have known then, but know now, was that this formula would end up being very important to me in my eventual professional career. When I would build magnetic models of motors in a boundary element software, I could use Cauchy's formula to check my parameters and assumptions. Fortunately, I only needed to construct a nearly closed curve in the right place and the program would calculate the value of the integral for me.
Of course, today all of these incarnations of myself are distant memories of which I am occasionally reminded when I stumble upon such unintentional time capsules.
Comments
Coincidentally, I'm reading The Brothers Karamazov right now. My own odd Lenten reading.
I know I tried to read it once before but know I didn't get very far. Still, I found underlining more than 100 pages in. I know it must have been me. I bought the book new and it's in the kind of pen I use and is the kind of passage I'd mark; but I have absolutely no memory of having read that section before and am really surprised I got that far. My own strange time capsule.
Funny - I was recently talking about this novel. It was actually part of my "why I was watching the Superbowl in 1995" story. (I wasn't actually watching the Superbowl... I was reading.) :)