[BlindMath] I'm blind! I love math! I want to go higher than high school geometry.

[Ray McAllister]

Hi, I'm totally blind, and have loved math and been good at math since my
father started teaching me when I was 3 and 4 years old.  I could do
long-hand division problems in my head at age 6.  I won math competitions in
high school.  One day, bored, in church, in high school, I figured out, in
my head, how to find the 5 5th roots of a number, using intuition,
completing the square, and the quadratic formula to break x^5 = y^5 down.
Last year, when I had Covid, I wanted to make sure nothing was happening to
my brain, so I started playing with magic square patterns, with inner magic
squares, a border square, basically.  I got up to 10x10 on my own, and then
wrote a computer program to take it up to 1000x1000 which means that I have
this Excel spread sheet here with a list of numbers from 1 to 1 million that
is a magic square, all rows, columns, and diagonals adding up to the same
number, with about 40,000 smaller magic squares inside it. 
     My path has been rather weird.  While I'm as good at math as many
people are socially, soecially, I'm as dyslexic as most people seem to be
with math.  Since higher math wasn't as accessible, as my small high school
didn't offer trig and precalculus, and things weren't as accessible, I ended
up following another passion, ministry, and ultimately got a pH.D. in Old
Testament, helping code advanced Hebrew symbols into Braille, which I was
part of the team that won the 2016 Bolotin award from the NFB.  Well, my
Ph.D. is getting me nowhere now, and my mind, at 48, is beginning to turn
toward math again, if anything, for a hobby.  I was able to go onto Khan
Academy and go through Trig, and while I can't see the diagrams, I was able
to figure out a number of proofs in my head.  I've had to get my student
loans forgiven, so I'm not allowed to take out any more federal loans, and I
wouldn't anyway for any more training.  I'm still wondering what kind of
path there could be for me in math, for fun, career, whatever.  I can't
afford any of those fancy graphical embossers.  I'd love to go at least
through Calculus, somehow.  I just work so naturally with numbers.  I feel
so held back by the world that just never seems to move fast enough for me,
if anyone out there understands.  

I have, though, been thinking of a way higher math, at least, at times,
could be described in text for someone who is blind and doesn't have all the
fancy equipment.  Sy lrsdy, for trig, has anyone played around the Cartesian
coordinate plane?  If you don't know how that works by the time you reach
trig, you're in a lot more trouble than missing triangle images.  Basically,
you could say,  We have a triangle, point A is on the origin.  Point B is at
(4, 0) and point C is at (1, 7).  Segment a is the line hooking points B and
C.  Segment b hooks points A and C.  Segment c hooks points A and B.  You
can do all kinds of things with this, including run a line segment d down
from point C, straight vertically to the X axis to split this into 2 right
triangles.  You can, then, write out proofs for things, and the blind reader
need only remember this diagram.  I wrote out a proof for the Law of Sines
using this system, and a couple more points and line segments I had to come
u pwith on Line c. I haven't found any place with Braille books on this
stuff I can access.  Of course, if someone's special ed office hired a
transcriber to transcribe a math book, has anyone thought of finishing the
job and getting it in the National Library Service once the blind student is
done with the material? 

I welcome discussion on this. 

Write soon, 
Ray McAllister. 





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