Mammu and I, we were on a tour of West Germany.
It was a very cold winter evening. We stepped in the street
to walk to a coffee shop. Mammu is only five and a half years old. We were
dressed similarly. Who do you think felt colder?
Answer: Here again there is an example of a problem
that does not seem mathematical at all at the first glance but a closer look
will reveal that this is a problem that cannot be solved without geometry.
We all know that
things usually cool down from the surface. So a child standing out in the
street, in the cold, feels the cold more than a similarly dressed adult, though
the amount of heat in each cubic centimeter of the body is almost the same in
the case of both.
A child has a greater cooling surface per one cubic
centimeter of the body than an adult.
This also explains why a person’s fingers and nose suffer
more from cold and get frost bitten oftener than any other parts of the body
whose surface is not so great when compared to their volume.
This same theory explains why splint wood catches fire
faster than the log from which it has been chopped off. Heat spreads from the
surface to the whole volume of a body and therefore the heat sets splint wood
on fire faster than the log.
