Anyone here like playing with cryptic crosswords? I only started with them a couple of months back, so I'm not yet very good, but I'm working at it.
It's only really during the last couple of months - when I started my maths degree, that I actually came to appreciate just how important the mastery of language and literature is when it comes to mathematics. It was a skill that I honestly had not given much thought to - I can read, I can write, I do both for pleasure, but I did nothing more.
Crosswords - even of the Quick variety - were not something I really spent my time pursuing, mostly because I did not particularly enjoy them. This in turn was mostly because I was not very good at them, either because I did not know the vocabulary they were after, or because I simple wasn't very good at linking that vocabulary with the definition in front of me.
But I've since returned to them, or rather the cryptic variety, and now spend time tussling with the intricacies of word play and patterns I have not yet spotted, connections and links I have not yet made. There is something intricately mathematical about the whole process, and I'm coming around to entirely new areas of literature and language I had not taken the time to consider before rejecting out of hand. Certainly, I now read different sorts of books to those I used to, and with pen and paper to hand so that I can look up words I have not met before. I also sometimes dip into my dictionary now too for further vocabulary, and whilst this may not directly help me to prove the Burnside Lemma or the Orbit-Stabilization Theorem, in the longer term I can see it helping me to think in different ways I would not previous have done.
So...any other solvers?
SourceTom Chivers said:
It's only really during the last couple of months - when I started my maths degree, that I actually came to appreciate just how important the mastery of language and literature is when it comes to mathematics. It was a skill that I honestly had not given much thought to - I can read, I can write, I do both for pleasure, but I did nothing more.
Crosswords - even of the Quick variety - were not something I really spent my time pursuing, mostly because I did not particularly enjoy them. This in turn was mostly because I was not very good at them, either because I did not know the vocabulary they were after, or because I simple wasn't very good at linking that vocabulary with the definition in front of me.
But I've since returned to them, or rather the cryptic variety, and now spend time tussling with the intricacies of word play and patterns I have not yet spotted, connections and links I have not yet made. There is something intricately mathematical about the whole process, and I'm coming around to entirely new areas of literature and language I had not taken the time to consider before rejecting out of hand. Certainly, I now read different sorts of books to those I used to, and with pen and paper to hand so that I can look up words I have not met before. I also sometimes dip into my dictionary now too for further vocabulary, and whilst this may not directly help me to prove the Burnside Lemma or the Orbit-Stabilization Theorem, in the longer term I can see it helping me to think in different ways I would not previous have done.
So...any other solvers?
