“The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.”
~ Aristotle
After a fairly typical life (school -> college -> job) for about 40 years of my life I decided to spend more time at home with family and with hobbies and retired.
And here, in retirement, was born the Jigyasu (curious) Juggler. Juggling had always fascinated me since watching some variety programmes on good old Doordarshan back in the 1980’s. I had taught myself to juggle the 3-ball shower one summer vacation while I was still at school. Now, most jugglers would tell you that the 3-ball cascade is much easier for a beginner to start with, not the shower. But then, I hadn’t had the good sense to be born either in a locality brimming with jugglers or in the age of the internet. All I had were some images that always seemed to show balls going around in a circle: the shower pattern. Anyway, that is where my juggling expertise stayed for many years till I turned back to it… only this time, with the benefit of the internet, YouTube and Charlie Dancey’s Encyclopaedia of Ball Juggling. The Encylopaedia also introduced me to the concept of “partner juggling”… passing patterns… juggling in teams! And so I started teaching others around me how to juggle and reached out to others who were already juggling in Bangalore and we founded ChAoS.
That explains the juggler, but why “jigyasu”? An aspect of juggling that fascinated me was the notation for juggling patterns. Here, I must mention Burkard Polster’s “The Mathematics of Juggling” which made me re-appreciate Aristotle’s statement: “The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” And the more curious you get ;-). This study of juggling notation, much of which is captured in my blogs, also helped me develop the ‘hand siteswap’ feature for the Juggling Lab simulator, which was incorporated in version 1.5 (November 2021).
Apart from how Maths and Physics are related to juggling, I’m also interested in exploring how those subjects developed over the course of history and how they may be taught in our schools. Some byproducts of these studies have been published at other avenues and some I intend to share on my blogs.