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An engineer named Peter
Straub visited our school last month and gave a talk. I went to it
because I'm
one of the physics teachers in the bilingual department.
I also went to it because Jane Su ( '02 ) said he
teaches calculus to fourth grade students. Wow! Can that be true?
Mr. Straub is an
engineer and an educator, currently working for the National Aeronautic and Space
Administration (NASA) in the US. He studied engineering at the University of
Michigan and taught at a
boys prep school in New Hampshire before coming to
NASA. He worked on a wind tunnel at NASA
which , if you are unfamiliar with wind
tunnels, is a long room, big enough
to put a truck in, and
equipped to generate 200 mph wind.
They're big and expensive. The one Mr. Straub described to us
was extra expensive because it was airtight and could
be sealed and pumped up to 8 atmospheres of
pressure. That's like closing all
the windows of your house, sealing all the cracks with tape and then
trying to inflate your house to twice the pressure of a bike tire, a formidable engineering problem.
Why build a high-pressure wind tunnel?
To test new flying craft (both planes and spacecraft) for design
flaws. If you find a flaw, there is still time to
re-design it and you only spent just one million dollars
on
the wind tunnel test rather than hundreds of millions to actually build
the plane. Testing, math, and the
design process were all recurring concepts in Mr. Straubs talk. Wind tunnel tests are done on miniature
versions of the planes ( nobody wants
to build a wind tunnel big enough to hold an entire commercial
airliner). The flow of the air over a miniature plane is an inaccurate model of the flow on a full sized plane
so a denser is fluid is used to compensate. Pressurized air is denser. Very interesting!
Mr. Straub was here to teach us though,
and for that, he had the biggest collection of homemade, hand-
glued, transparent objects that I had ever seen. Most of
the plexiglass were very strange variations on a
cube and had a cork in the bottom. When he filled the objects with water and pulled the cork, water came
out. That's it - pull the cork, and time how long it takes to drain the object.
What can you show with that that our eighth grade students don't already know? Plenty! Mr. Straub
show
how to derive formal math expressions for the speed of the draining water.
He also tied in gravitational
energy, capacitance (using an enormous capacitor… note to
bilingual physics department: let's buy one
like his!), and finally, the rate and energy associated with galaxies "flowing" in the universe.
He stressed two things about
the role of math in life. First, he noted that pure and perfect math answers
only exist in math, in real life the math doesn't perfectly work.
( can you tell he's an engineer
? )
Heemphasized that we love the math in spite of this
mis - match. It's a measure of your skill and art as a
mathematician, he said, to see how well your equation
models
reality.
Second, math is
beautiful because it allows prediction.
Mankind enjoys most favored species status
precisely because of its ability to predict nature, therefore harnessing it.
After the talk, several school parents joined
Mr. Straub at a Gun Du Yuen ( 耕讀園 ) tea house where he
several times commented on the high scholastic ability of our students at NEHS.
He also impressed all
present by telling a story of the Buddha
riding an ox, based on a statue he saw
in the teahouse. He
expressed appreciation for the traditional
aspects of Taiwan culture and said it was his strong wish for
Taiwan to not change too fast.
The talk he gave at our
school was full of many interesting ideas and demonstrations although, come to
think of it, he never did get around to an explicit
lesson in the Calculus. Maybe that's because there were
no fourth graders present! We look forward to seeing Mr. Straub again.
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