Paula Beardell Krieg
While strolling through math I continually bump concepts that makes no sense to me. My strategy for navigating into and through these mysterious obstacles is to poke, prod and research everything about them, trusting that their secrets will be revealed.
2400 years ago the Greek mathematician Eudoxus devised a generalization for doubling the volume of a cube. His equation, the Kamplye of Eudoxus, stopped me in my tracks. Deciphering its number relationships was beyond me but I was able to tease out a gorgeous visual pattern from its graph. I read the story which inspired the pursuit of this curve, learned to create it with compass and ruler, made cubes with doubled volumes, wrestled an understanding of implicit equations, and examined art from Eudoxus's era. Finally, when the equation let me in, I gathered my notes, drawings, patterns, and boxes, then arranged, bound, and tucked them, artfully, into this folder inspired by Chinese sewing kits, for sharing as well as for remembering.