Two of my closest friends are retired mathematics teachers. How did that happen? Mathematicians look at the world in slightly different ways from the rest of us. And sometimes, the things they say make me look at things a little differently, too.
Case in point: a recent comment about a cowlick sent one of my Euclidean friends into a discourse on DNA and mathematical principles. You know about cowlicks, right? A cowlick is a pesky hunk of hair that sticks up, even when you comb it down, even when you smother it in hair gel. It looks like a cow licked your hair in one spot. (That’s where the name came from, by the way: from the way a calf’s hair looks after its mom has licked it. Have you ever been licked by a cow? The combination of that raspy tongue and a healthy layer of cow saliva should tame any cowlick.)
A cowlick can make you crazy because it seemingly can’t be controlled! You can comb a cowlick all you want, but it just won’t lie down. You can have a cowlick anywhere on your head, like a little sprig shooting up from the back or a goofy wave in the front. What’s a person to do? Since most of them are reoccurring, it’s usually best just to live with it.
So, OK, my ex-professor friend injected into our discussion of cowlicks the notion that these anomalies are part of our DNA and that everyone who has hair has at least one cowlick. When he mentioned algorithms and singularities, my eyes glazed over and I changed the subject.
But some time later, that rather odd conversation sneaked into the back of my mind and I decided to check it out. After all, at one point in my misguided youth, I had actually considered earning a math minor. And if I’d had a better calculus professor, I might have gone down that road to the place where (according to my high school math teacher) “problems have answers and truth exists.”
My foray into the hairy problem (pun intended!) of cowlicks and mathematics left me a little confused. Some of the articles I read made comparisons to fingerprints and hair whorls. I found out that Norm’s use of the word “singularity” really can apply to cowlicks.
I’m not sure I understand it, but, according to one article, “What makes a cowlick ‘singular’ is that a variable (the hair’s direction) changes abruptly and discontinuously there.” Do you understand that? I don’t.
After that article, I gave up trying to understand the mathematical jargon. So I looked at a different kind of angle, a scientific explanation. Listen to this: “One theory is that a cowlick stems from a circular arrangement of the collagen fibers in the cranial fascia of the area of the cowlick. This arrangement is different from the normal, straight pattern.” What?
Then I read an article that said cowlicks (or hair whorls) have been studied by some behaviorists. Most people have clockwise scalp hair-whorls, but counter-clockwise whorls are not uncommon.
Some scientists have conducted research to see if there was a genetic link between right- or left-handedness and hair-whorl direction. They found that about 90 percent of people are right-handed, and their hair whorls are found oriented in a clockwise direction. The remaining 10 percent, the left-handed people, have their cowlicks in a counter-clockwise direction. Fascinating, isn’t it?
Most of the stuff I read said the cowlicks are thought to be hereditary, and they affect both genders. Since we men usually wear shorter hairstyles, our cowlicks are more visible, and since women generally prefer longer hair, they cover the seemingly stubborn cowlicks atop their head.
There is no escape, and every one of us (unless we’re bald) is endowed with at least one hair whorl. In fact, most people actually have two cowlicks, but usually only one will be quite visible while the other is obscured.
“Bad hair days” are almost always caused by cowlicks.
There’s also some research into the connection between cowlicks and behavior. One geneticist says that if a child has two or more cowlicks, the child will be a rascal. By the time I got to that article, I was tired of the subject, and I suspect you are, too!
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