Mathematics

This is a picture of a sign in a church in Dresden. “Ausgang” means exit but what about all the arrows and the box with the arrow in the opposite direction!? Either too much or too little thought was put into this exit sign.

I have wondered for a long time how Germans deal with numbers. Firstly, the seven (7) has the horizontal dash through the middle and the one (1) often looks like a capital “A” minus the horizontal dash through the middle and sometimes it looks like a seven. It’s a bit hard to get used to writing like that but I was more concerned with the numbers in college with which I spent my time: letters. The more advanced the mathematics classes got, the less numbers we used and the same was also true in engineering classes. Would F still represent force, though force is Stärke (or Stempel or Kraftgröβe) in German? Well friends, today, I have the answer.

My classes have been largely concept based and most of the concepts are not technical but rather how to implement technology and design in projects. Today we started talking numbers in my robotic motion class and we used several familiar terms. F still means force, g is gravity, the coordinate system is xyz, they use the right hand rule for moments (still m), and most surprisingly, the cog is the center of gravity. They have a word for this – Schwerpunkt (Heavy point) – but the professor said “center of gravity”. The only difference today was in the Identity Matrix, represented here by E, not I (E for Einheitsmatrix). Math, the international language.