Thursday, March 26, 2009

Abstract: Literally


I wanted to do something a little nerdier for this challenge, and I knew that I could. My husband is a statistician. This is a photo of a derivation he did for a homework assignment in grad school. Initially, I wanted to post it and say, "this is a picture of...literally...an abstract." But he said it's not actually an abstract. It's a derivation. Well, a proof, he clarified. But it uses mathematical abstraction to provide a mathematical relationship between ordinal categorical variables.

Whatever that means.

About the photo: it is completely unedited. I did nothing to it except load it from the camera to the computer. I tried a couple of things, but it just looked best in its original form.

12 comments:

Breezi@ Not Your Average Fairytale said...

holy cow! I don't even know what the ( ) are for. No wonder why I'm not a statistician or anything else relating to math!
Cool picture!

B-Blogit said...

this brings back nightmares of my statistics class I had to take twice...I think that statistics is totaly abstract.

princess jen said...

Gets a chuckle from me! Good interpretation of the theme!

AprilF said...

Great interpretation! Very creative!

Mindy said...

I love your idea for abstract! And I loved reading your post... I had no idea what you were talking about, but it cracked me up.

Janelle said...

Mindy...I pretty much wrote what my husband said. I don't know what it meant either. :)

Candace said...

Wow... looks a little like calculus, which I loved, but what you wrote made no sense to me, so I guess I never understood it, right? hmm... I've confused myself now....

Love the interpretation, though! :)

Rachel Holloway said...

That is hilarious! I too was reading a different language and didn't catch most of this. :) Very creative take!

Melinda said...

That description went WAY over my head. But I do think it's neat to do the 'nerdy' take on this. I think I'd brighten it just a bit, but I like the composition otherwise!

Melinda said...
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Shanda Call said...

That hurts my head to look at it!! I hate numbers! But the shot has a nice composition to it. Would have been fun to see the paper with an old fashioned tint color or something...

Teryn said...

I was going to do something like this! Well kinda- my hubby is in med school and they have "abstracts" of articles in the medical journal. They just weren't very interesting photographically. Just words. I love this! Aren't you glad SOMEONE can understand this stuff?