How My Little Pony turned a little girl into a computer scientist | Hacker News Reader

How My Little Pony turned a little girl into a computer scientist

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38 pointsaraneae14 comments

Well, I read that as "If you have that kind of sciencey/geeky mind, you'll see math everywhere - even in some dumb plastic pony".

Yeah, I don't know. I feel like we all had something like this when we were tiny.

This is entirely about a very bright little girl and not at all about My Little Pony.

If you have the right mind, you'll see the math in whatever you're focused on - radios, Legos, or dolls.

yyyes, sort of---but when someone says that their, I dunno, Erector set taught them about careful engineering and design, we don't tend to say "this is entirely about a very bright little boy (or girl) and not at all about Erector sets". Is that because construction sets tend to be more associated with boys? Almost any time I see a comment of the form "X taught me about Y when I was little", it usually really means "I was inspired to discover Y by some feature of X", not so much that X was an edutainment toy designed to teach Y.

So why not X=My Little Pony?

I don't think recursive braiding of hair is ever something that's been suggested by My Little Pony toys in the same way construction is encouraged by Lego.

Drifting slightly off-topic--the self-similar structure of cauliflower is neat, but is put to shame by a closely related plant. Behold, the king of recursive food, the ultimate fractal vegetable: Romanesco Broccoli. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/Fractal_B...

Sounds like she was close to rediscovering the Mandelbrot set.

Sure does. Boys could do that to but are too busy demonstrating that Force = Mass * Acceleration.

A diamond in the rough! (in the literal sense)

Great to see the spirit of curiosity and intellect alive in the most unlikely of circumstances.

Hu?

You make it seem like she grew up in a 3rd world country sorting garbage for a living, and found a pony which changed her life.

What's unlikely about her life? And why's she a diamond in the rough?

She probably when to school like everyone else, and the pony had nothing to do with it. It was just a prop.

A diamond "in the rough" is not a diamond surrounded by roughness, but rather an unpolished diamond. Or at least that's how gemcutters use the term. The idea that a "diamond in the rough" is related to sorting diamonds from junk is probably a folk etymology.

So you are saying she is an unpolished diamond? Or was? Perhaps, but no more than any other budding mathematician/computer scientist.

really thought this was going to be a Fake Steve Jobs post about Jonathan Schwartz: http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/02/my-little-pony-a-look-back....

Personally, I find it interesting to see this young person's mathematical mind manifest itself in such a way. She apparently adored her My Little Pony, and became consumed in pushing division into her braiding experience with it. Sure it was a prop, and she would have likely started doing the same thing elsewhere; but, it's engaging to see such an origin.

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