This week wasn‘t too interesting to be honest? We didn’t get much character development, apart from 家政婦さん getting a 閃き and probably getting hooked on maths.
Everyone who has ever heard the Gauß story before probably saw it coming miles away, although I was surprised that they didn’t use the visualization of
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
+ + + + + + + + + +
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
so you have 11 in each column, times 10 and then divide by 2. That‘s the version I always heard.
This week’s reading also felt really short. Looking forward to the next chapter
It was a bit slow for the first half, but I thought it was really exciting following the narrator’s journey in solving the math problem. One of the great things about math is that there are multiple solutions, and it was cool that they didn’t use either of the solutions that Myria and I had remembered. Using the average is quite brilliant, too. And I think 小川洋子 did a really great job at conveying that feeling of figuring out a solution. I took a math analysis course back in the day that started with the 10 or so unprovable postulates of math (there is a number 0 such that… there is a number 1 such that…), and then proceeded to derive the rest of math, more or less. We’d have maybe 2-4 problems a week, spend 30-40 or so hours on them, and turn in the assignment incomplete. But when we did manage to solve the problem, it was an amazing feeling.
Oh, and if that baseball ending isn’t foreshadowing, then I don’t know what is. Maybe I should just stop reading while we’re all feeling good.
I’m quite late to the party, but I’ve started the book recently and I’m continuing it now in the spring reading challenge (love it so far). I got to week 6 today (haven’t finished yet though) and a question popped up in my head - it’s actually related to what’s going to be next, so I’m hiding it just in case there was another late reader besides me
Explanation
I used koohi cafe to build up the most frequent vocabulary before starting the book and I do think it made reading easier for me. As I saw in the reviews and found out by myself, beside maths, there is apparently going to be a lot of baseball talk. So I’m wondering if I should educate myself in this area (I kind of already started though ) to be able to understand the upcoming parts without difficulties? In other words, to what extent will the talk involve rules of the game and related vocab?
Baseball does come up a few times, but not as much as math. I don’t remember the details, but I probably wouldn’t go out of my way to learn baseball related vocab unless you’re a baseball fan planning to read/talk about baseball in the future.
Like @maskedkoala said, it does not pop up as much, only in a few focused spots. But in one of these spots they actually talk about the game a lot - at least enough that I got curious and read the Wikipedia page about baseball just to get the general idea of the game. But that was it for me, I did not invest more time. I think it helped me understand some parts somewhat better. But even if you don’t really understand what’s going on, it doesn’t matter for the story afair.
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) to be able to understand the upcoming parts without difficulties? In other words, to what extent will the talk involve rules of the game and related vocab?