Dear friends, Please tell me what the word "glimpsing" means in the following article: "spent my teenage years scrambling up the mountain of mathematics. Midway up the slope, however, I staggered to a halt, gasping in the rarefied air, well before I reached the heights where the equations of Einstein and Dirac would have made sense. Nowadays I add, subtract, multiply, and do long division when no calculator is handy, and I can do algebra and geometry and even trigonometry in a pinch, but that is about all that I''''ve kept from the language of numbers. Still, I remember glimpsing patterns in mathematics that seemed as bold and beautiful as a skyful of stars. "
Glimpsing: To glimpse Glimpse: a brief or incomplete view of something Well that's what the dictionary saying, and having read the passage the word makes perfect sense in context.
But the problem is: how did the author only take a brief look at patterns in mathematics since he loves them? It seemed unreasable.Usually if people love something they gaze instead of glimpsing. So I think it's not the author who glimpsed, but the patterns themsselves were glimpsing or glimmering--rhetoric. right?
It's simple isn't it? The author's probably American. Americans have a nasty habit of confusing the meanings of words.
It makes perfect sense to me. Patterns are emergent properties of complex systems that can slip in and out of perception. Like star constellations, melodies or magic eye pictures you may see the grand pattern only for the blink of an eye even though you see all the star, notes or dots clearly all of the time.
You're the mindless one for that comment, when you don't know the individual you are insulting at all. Our comments were general, not specific.
