Math Angst

I had a good learning experience this morning. Actually, more of a meta-learning experience. I’ve been playing around with Erlang lately, so I was poking around on the mailing list archives for an Erlang project and ran across this discussion thread. To paraphrase:

“Hey, got any good ideas about how to index geospatial data across the datastore?”

“You could create a flat index using some combination of quadtrees and Hilbert curves.”

“Thanks, that sounds pretty straightforward.”

Wow, these guys are so far out of my league. They’re bandying these terms about, and I have no idea what they mean. I don’t even have the base knowledge to understand this conversation. I’m trying to learn this stuff because I want to work with smart people on interesting problems, but this is way over my head.

But then one of the posts is: “Hey, here’s a good article on how to do this.” I read it and I’m like, “Oh! I totally get that!” There’s this almost physical sensation of new bits of knowledge snapping into place. It’s more of a sense of recognition than learning, like I just hadn’t known the name for these things. It’s not like I could have come up with this solution — Hilbert curves are evidently a novel enough idea that somebody got to put their name on it — but I’ve got the framework to make sense of it and apply it. I can quickly grasp the concept and see how it could be useful.

For a half-hour of web surfing, that was pretty productive. I learned about quadtrees and Hilbert curves, which is cool on its own. I was also reminded — I may never really learn this — not to be intimidated by terminology, that I do have enough smarts, math background, and interest to learn some of this stuff. I should at least look it up on Wikipedia or something before I get all freaked out.