Sacred Arithmetic

September 10, 2010
By Bobby Neal Winters

Anthony Esolen has written an excellent article for the Touchstone blog about numbers and the mysteries to be encountered therein. Dr. Esolen is a mathematical amateur in the original sense of the word: someone who pursues an activity out of love, not because it is his profession.

I am a professional, and I note that he perceives mysteries that have slipped past many of my colleagues. Numbers are not the straight-forward things they appear. What we teach to preschoolers, what we chide eight-graders for not understanding, contain puzzles as deep as any met by the doctors of the church. the rest image by Thomas Beck

...A baby human is not a fraction of a human, and neither is a handicapped human. We are whole entities than cannot be divided. That is our sacred arithmetic.