Some years ago I spent a little time exploring different representations of the relative ages of myself, my wife, and my kids. The “bubble chart” at the end of _this post was one of the results. I thought for Creativity inDay I might swing back around to the concept, this time representing our birth dates as quadratic _ functions of the form (month)x2 + (day)x + (year).
Twenty-ish minutes fiddling around with Function Plot produced this:
According to Wikipedia creativity is “a phenomenon whereby something new and valuable is formed.” Well…this is something “new” anyway, and I quite like the effect. I’m the blue - nice and broad, by virtue of having an early January birthday. By contrast my oldest daughter was born in late August, producing a much “steeper” parabola. (My wife and my youngest have May and April birthdays, resp.)
Positive translation along the y-axis (the birth year constant) provides an unexpectedly melancholy reminder that on a long enough time scale the year in which you were born honestly doesn’t matter all that much. Backing out even further evokes a bittersweet story. These lines will never again converge…but as time marches onward the coefficients become trivial and drop away, revealing lines that march onward toward eternity, diverging but very nearly in parallel.
My wife, forever in between my two girls…and me, arms wrapped around the outside, in a kind of infinite family hug.
I suppose it’s all a matter of perspective.
Anyhow…Happy inDay, folks.