Biography

Ariel Sharon died last week. After spending a long period of time in a coma, he finally passed. I have to admit that before a few years ago, I didn't have a very complex idea of who Sharon was, what he had done, etc.; and, to a certain extent, I think that helped me come to know him as the complex individual he (and the rest of us) was/are/can be in both our minute daily lives and when looked at as the sum of the area under the curve of our life's path; the integral of the arc our lives have followed. In math, (calculus, to be exact) one of the simplest ways to estimate the area under any line drawn on a piece of paper is to split that curve up into a few sections, like this:

Then, we draw the blue rectangles, calculate the area of each of them (length x width), add those areas together and BOOM!!, we've approximated the area under the curve from a to b. Of course, this is a really poor approximation; just look at all the blue sticking up above the curve, and the white sitting below it for evidence. 

We can make this same kind of approximation if we imagine Ariel Sharon's life as a line/path that has moved through time, geography, culture, politics,..... If we wanted to find a rough approximation of who Sharon was, we can split his life up into a few different chunks, say pre-Prime Ministership and post-PM election, then average the "type" of man he was in those two time periods, add them together and BOOM!! we've approximated Ariel Sharon. But, damn is it a crude approximation. The man is elected Prime Minister of Israel and instantly becomes a different "type" of man than he was before that instant. It seems ridiculous because it is, but in calculus we have a very simple way to remedy thiss problem; we split the curve up into smaller and smaller rectangles, like this:

If we add up all of those rectangle/chunks of Sharon's life, we get a much better answer to the questions 'what is the area under the curve?' or 'Who was Ariel Sharon?' than we did before. but, it's still not perfect, in math we use a brilliant technique invented by Gottfried Leibniz to 'integrate' the curve by splitting it up into infinitely many little rectangles. But, doing so with the sum of a person's life experiences is impossible; in effect, we would have to re-live Sharon's life, and each of us can only live our own lives, and certainly could not re-live Sharon's without bringing our own histories with us for the ride. All we can do is inspect the lives of those around us in as much detail as we can, and keep in mind that calculating the sum of a person's character based on a limited number of 'data points' or 'personal interactions' is a sure way to mis-judge that person. All of us understand how complex our own lives are/have been, and going forward we need to keep in mind that no matter how hard we try, or closely we look, we can never see all of the area under the twisted curve of another person's path through life.