Two images of a wave in Waimea Bay, Hawaii, taken 0.1 s apart, reveal how quickly things can change from beauty to chaos (or vice versa). © 2014 David E. Shormann
I never cease to be amazed by the technology of today’s digital cameras. By pushing a few buttons, anyone crazy enough to bob around in a 6-8′ high shore break can capture some amazing beauty in God’s creation! But as the photos above reveal, the beauty only lasts for an instant.
It seems impossible that things can change from beauty to chaos, or vice-versa, in so short a time. But big changes can and do occur in even less time than the tenth of a second that elapsed between these two photos.
Strangely enough, instantaneous change, something us humans really can’t fully comprehend, is behind almost every major technological achievement of the past 300+ years! How can that be? How can something we will never fully understand help us make all sorts of useful devices? Well, some things we just have to take on faith. Faith is at the heart of the branch of mathematics known as calculus. And calculus is all about the study of instantaneous change.
Subjects like calculus are easier to grasp when we consider the Author of every instant of time, and Creator of the biggest and best instantaneous changes of all. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:52 how we will be changed “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.”
Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), a devout Christian man considered the best mathematician ever, wrote that “it is God, therefore, who places men, every instant, in circumstances the most favourable, and from which, they may derive motives the most powerful, to produce their conversion; so that men are always indebted to God, for the means which promote their salvation.”
Euler understood God’s relationship with man and creation very well. He also understood mathematics really well, too! Much of the way we teach mathematics today comes from Euler’s textbooks on the subject.
In our new Shormann Mathematics curriculum, we believe that all 10 major topics covered, including and especially calculus, are best understood by connecting the study of mathematics to Jesus Christ, the founder of all knowledge, and the founder and perfecter of our faith (Hebrews 12:2).
Studying His Word and His Works 