The World is a Function

Kakeru Seki: A fact is somehow related to another fact. Unless you understand these relationships, you won't be a real reporter.

Noriko Hikima: True journalism!

Kakeru Seki: Well, you majored in the humanities.

Noriko Hikima: Yes! That's true--I've studied literature since I was in high school.

Kakeru Seki: You havea lot of catching up to do, then. Let's begin with functions.

Noriko Hikima: Fu...functions? Math? What?

Kakeru Seki: When one thing changes, it influences another thing. A function is a correlation. You can think of the world itself as one big functions. A function describes a relation, causality, or change. As journalists, our job is to find the reason why things happen--the causality.

Noriko Hikima: Yes...

Kakeru Seki: Did you know a function is often expressed as y=f(x)?

Noriko Hikima: Nope!!

Kakeru Seki: For example, assume x and y are animals. Assume x is a frog. If you put the frong into box f and convert it, tadpole y comes out of the box.

Noriko Hikima: But, uh... What is f?

Kakeru Seki: The f stands for "function," naturally. f is used t oshow that the variable y has a particular relationship to x. And we can actually use an letter instead of f.

In this case, f expresses the relationship or rule between "A parent" and "an offspring."

Noriko Hikima: And this relationship is true of almost any animal. If x is a bird, y is a chick.

Kakeru Seki: Okay! Now look at this. For example, the relationship between incomes and expenditures can be seen as a function.

Noriko Hikima: Like how when sales at a company go up, the employees get bonuses?

Kakeru Seki: The speed of sound and the temperature can also be expressed as a function. When the temperature goes up by 1 degree C, the speed of sound goes up by 0.6 meters/second.

Noriko Hikima: And the temperature in the mountains goes down by about 0.5 degrees C each time you go up 100 meters, doesn't it?

Kakeru Seki: Do you get it? We are surrounded by functions.

Noriko Hikima: I see what you mean!

As a programmer I know that algorithms can relate to the real world, and since these algorithms are constructed in computers that ultimately run on bits and boolean logic, then the real world may be imagined to deconstruct to pure mathematics.