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

[David W. Farmer]

Dear Ray,

The PreTeXt protect, specifically David Austin and Rob Beezer,
is currently working on an accessible version of the book
Active Prelude to Calculus.  This includes Nemeth braille and
accessible diagrams, with the diagrams having both a tactile
representation and a description with words.

The level of the mathematics seems appropriate for you, and I am
sure they would be happy to have you as a proofreader.  You did
not mention whether you can read Nemeth.  I am not sure what type
of embosser these diagrams require.

If you email me off-group, the four of us can talk about how
to proceed.

Regards,

David


On Fri, 15 Sep 2023, Ray McAllister via BlindMath wrote:

> 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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