Should you date a mathematician?

http://blog.tanyakhovanova.com/2011/03/should-you-date-a-mathematician/

by dscpls • 11 years ago

22 6 11 years ago

blog.tanyakhovanova.com

wanda• 11 years ago

  Their wives complain that their husbands didn’t
  notice that the furniture was repossessed or
  that their old cat died and was replaced by a
  dog. My third husband was like that. At some
  point in my marriage I discovered that he
  didn’t know the color of my eyes. He didn’t
  know the color of his eyes either. He wasn’t
  color-blind: he was just indifferent. I asked
  him as a personal favor to learn the color of
  my eyes by heart and he did. My friend Irene
  even suggested creating a support group for the
  wives of such mathematicians.

I'm really bad when it comes to this sort of thing. My partner often quizzes me on things that were apparently "discussed" which I actually didn't hear because I was engrossed in something else.

I'm generally very apathetic which makes my partner question whether I love them sometimes. It is peculiar why we should love.

TeMPOraL• 11 years ago

My partner often quizzes me on things that were apparently "discussed" which I actually didn't hear because I was engrossed in something else.

I absolutely hate that. I have a pretty good memory, I do remember lot of random trivias about conversations. And yet my SO can always find something that I missed, and likes to ask me about it few weeks after it was first spoken. I try to convince her to find another way of "checking" my attention, because this won't "fix" my memory. It'll only make me paranoid.

EDIT:

Another thing that I actually learned for her is the color of her eyes. I'm not indifferent. I simply don't notice. Maybe it's because of being myopic for most of my life, or maybe because I'm wired differently - but my brain just doesn't register those details unless I explicitly focus on them. Similarly, I often can't tell when someone brightened or darkened their hair (that is, unless it's something like going from blond to black). I suck at remembering faces, couldn't describe them from memory to save my life, and usually I even quickly forget what clothes someone is wearing. So my only countertip to this article is - for the love of $DEITY, don't assume everyone is sensitive to minor appearance changes. For some, it doesn't register. And it's not because of indifference.

santaclaus• 11 years ago

which I actually didn't hear because I was engrossed in something else.

This so much, and not just with my partner. I will have complete, coherent conversations, but a part of my mind is off thinking about Willmore Flow or some such nonsense, and I will have zero recollection about the content of the conversation later...

srean• 11 years ago

Thanks to mobile phones we can at least pace around and talk to ourselves without appearing crazy.

tilt_error• 11 years ago

My brother is a dentist. At four he leaves his office and goes home.

I have worked with software development for quite some time. The nasty thing is that lately it has become so easy to connect to work, fire up the dev-environment from home on evenings and weekends to continue tinker with that piece of code or that nasty bug.

Imagine having a job where your problem is not constrained to a person that has to be in your vicinity for you to work or a job where you cannot at least fake that you have problems with your internet connection :)

You cannot easily unscrew your head at the end of the day and it is only too natural to continue to linger in your head in problem-solving mode. Imagine doing this for the greater part of your life and you may end up with exactly the problems described here.

joshguthrie• 11 years ago

_Should you date a mathematician or not?

_Yes.

Should you date a mathematician?

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