My Five Ball Journey

Published: 2021-11-3

This post would not exist without The Man Who Only Loved Numbers by Paul Hoffman. The book gives a pretty detailed account of Hungarian mathmetician Paul Erdős (pronounced air dish). I had not heard of him before this book and could not believe how much he’s flown under the radar. The stories about this benzendrine reliant mathematician is the stuff of legends. He’s so prolific that other mathmeticians who collaborated on research with him are assigned an Erdős number. Erdős was given the number 0. Those who collaborated directly with him were given the number 1 and those who collaborated with the 1’s were given the number 2 and so on. Aside from the mathematics there was one part that stuck out to me which is the reason I’ve have spent countless hours with juggling balls.

During a portion of the book, Erdős’s friend Ronald Graham says the following: “When you see someone juggling five balls, you know that he went through the same long learning curve that you did. That creates a commond bond and instant camaraderie”. He goes on to say that the process of working on a difficult math problem is akin to the challenges faced in juggling 5 balls. Considering my days of taking down extremely difficult math problems are very much behind me (not that they were every really there), I felt that joining the five ball juggling club would be a good replacement. The nice thing was that I had already learned to juggle three balls as a camp counselor a few years back. However, Graham was correct in highlighting the difficulty of going from three to five. It’s a whole different ball game. What I had thought would be a few week process has turned in to something much more, and is still ongoing.

While learning to juggle five balls may not directly make you a better software developer, I do think the process that you must go through helps in any aspect of life. I think there is something to be said for laying out a concrete goal and working towards acheving it. It’s especially nice because it’s not an ambiguous goal. You can either juggle five balls at once or you can’t. Whether the outcome is true or false is directly attributed to the amount of time, energy, and effort you’ve exerted. At this point in writing I can only do a 5 ball flash on a consistent basis. This just means that I can throw five up in the air and catch all of them. It’s a step in the right direction but I have much to go. Honestly though it’s a pretty nice way to take a 10 minute break from the computer. I’ll put a video of where I’m at below.

Onward and Upward