{"id":59,"date":"2016-05-06T16:29:16","date_gmt":"2016-05-06T20:29:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/annie.mathematicalthinking.org\/?p=59"},"modified":"2018-06-12T14:36:26","modified_gmt":"2018-06-12T18:36:26","slug":"math-for-moms-birthday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/annie.mathematicalthinking.org\/index.php\/2016\/05\/06\/math-for-moms-birthday\/","title":{"rendered":"Math For Mom’s Birthday"},"content":{"rendered":"

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May the 4th was not only Star Wars Day but was also my mother’s birthday. She died in February 2014.\u00a0\u00a0I decided to celebrate by taking a vacation day and digging in the garden, which was one of my mother’s favorite things to do (I’m pretty good in the garden, but I swear she could weed at least four times faster than me, and yes, I totally took advantage of that by enlisting her help more than once!).\u00a0\u00a0I did some weeding, including the final cleaning out of this one area of the yard into which we are transplanting a bunch of irises and day lilies that our neighbor was removing from his front yard (our new neighbors are not plant fans, apparently – they have also cut down a dogwood and a Japanese maple).<\/p>\n

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When loosening the soil in the bed, I hit a rock, and decided that I’d dig it up (another thing my tenacious and hard-working mother would have done).\u00a0\u00a0It turned out to be two large rocks – the one in the picture that includes my foot for scale (Estimation180<\/a> anyone?) and the one leaning against the fence in the other picture (which includes a pint glass for scale).<\/p>\n

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But enough about my day off. This is a math blog, after all, so I really wanted to talk about how my mother not only persevered when faced with a giant rock in her flower bed, but also when she was designing some of her fabulous textiles.\u00a0\u00a0Let’s start by watching the Ignite that I did about her at NCSM last spring, shortly after she died.<\/p>\n