Numbers

I'm glad that I've always been comfortable with numbers and that math has come relatively easy to me. As I started thinking about where this came from, I was amazed to realize that it really tracked back to my grandmother.  This was my mom's mother, Josephine Helen Nauman Milburn. She was 94 when she died in June of 2000, still living in her own home. She was taking out the garbage at the time she passed away.  I am sure that I speak for many of us when I say that I certainly hope I have some of that karma in my life.

Grandma and Grandpa were very important members of my life, as they were to all of their children and grandchildren. When I was still relatively young, Grandma was still working in the Keokuk County Engineer's office. She had all of the knowledge to be an engineer, from the practical point of view, but didn't have the required educational background.  At least two of the people that she worked for told me that.  Anyway, at that time, the office was open on Saturday until noon.  On good weekends, I would get to wake up early, go to breakfast at the Town House Cafe with Grandpa and then he dropped me off at the courthouse to spend part of the morning with Grandma.  Our mornings were somewhat of a ritual.

During the course of the morning, we would make and fly paper airplanes.  In later years, when they went to paint the office, they found some of the planes on top of a high set of shelves.  You know, sometimes that just happens.  After our flight exercise though, Grandma would sit me down at a drafting table with an architect's rule and a set of colored pencils and we would draw house plans.  I was forever trying to figure out how to design a house with a round kitchen.  The problem wasn't really the kitchen, it was the rest of the rooms around the kitchen and what you did with those spaces.  To this day, I haven't come up with a good answer.  But, with this work, Grandma taught me about scale and how to draw plans "to scale."  I was probably the only 7-10 year old in Sigourney, Iowa that could accurately read and understand all of the scales on the rule that I was using.

When we were done with that, the next thing was to use the ten column calculator in the office.  This thing was a MONSTER.  It seemed like one of the biggest pieces of equipment I had ever seen, let alone used.  And in a day when very few calculations had to be carried out to ten columns, I am sure that it was also a very expensive piece of equipment.  But, being the lucky young man that I was, I got to sit there and figure out how numbers went together and of course what you had to add to overflow the capability of the calculator.  You know, you always have to figure that out.

Now, as if this were not all enough to cement a love of numbers into my brain, Grandma also had a couple of number games that she liked to play.  One was to come up with a mathematical "equation" that would describe someone's birthday, and the other was to do the same thing with their license plates.

I will give you an example.  Let's say that someone's birthday was September 27,1993.  We would work through this and come to the decision that all you really had to remember was that this person was born in '93.  From that you could remember that they were born in September (the ninth month) and on the 27th (9 x 3).  We played this game all of the time, and honestly, I still use this trick to help me remember people's birthdays and other special days.

After Grandma started me down this path, somewhere along the line someone taught me the Pythagorean theorem - A2 + B2 = C2 - and I was off and running.  Still today, with this basic interest in math and these tricks, along with a little understanding of percentages, I get through a lot of situations with ease.

Last week, as a group of intelligent men that I work with were trying to calculate the volume of a cylinder, I was able to estimate it as a cube and come to an answer while we were still on-site.  I know that one of the gentlemen I was working with is probably still in his office crunching numbers, but I'm sure that my estimate was close enough. Though they talked about finishing the conversation after they'd done all of the calculations back in the office, I knew we had plenty of information to move forward.

I appreciate having the confidence and assurance that the quick calculations I do in my head are generally correct. It has made my life a whole lot easier and sometimes a whole lot of fun. Thanks for the help Grandma Jo.