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To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

quantamagazine.org

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Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#81

Post by flatline »

nabla9 wrote: post #54
gthtjtkt wrote: post #8

Based on all the supposed benefits of doing math, it sounds like people would be better off studying philosophy. Same benefits but a much broader appeal, and far more applicable to most people's everyday lives. When I finally "discovered" philosophy in college, I was angry that we hadn't been exposed to it at all in middle or high school. Instead, I'd been forced to waste years on things like math, biology, etc. that…

Real philosophy can't be limited to some set of tools or into some set of books and approaches that fits into curriculum. Philosophy is completely open ended pursuit. I firmly believe that philosophy without mathematically oriented thinking at the core is limiting. Teaching and studying of formal logic has been traditionally part of philosophy. In practice there is no real border between philosophy and formal science…

I think this is an excellent description of where philosophy has gone wrong for me personally. I took a class in high school and found the study of what amounts to history to be rather tedious and fruitless. A close friend was a philosophy major in college and understood lots of abstractions that came from the field, but it would seem that none of them were applicable to everyday life. They were not useful or practical in any fashion.

It's very much like learning the history of mathematics without being able to e.g. solve an integral, or model a problem in the real world and make meaningful observations about the model and its relation to the subject. History is fine if it's what you're into, but the other is not taught in any widely disseminated fashion and I believe people and society are deprived as a result.

There are entire sub-disciplines of philosophy that are useful and practical for everyday decision making. Here I would disagree that you need a formal background in mathematics. Game theory, statistics and the like are certainly valuable, but they are still more a part of the engineer's or mathematician's toolkit and will be glossed over due to their rigorous technical underpinnings that are simply out of reach for many individuals. Rhetoric, critical thinking, stoicism, ethics, and the like are pretty approachable topics that have somehow been elided from the educational system in any established fashion in the US - and they used to be at the core of a liberal arts education. Great religious thinkers, politicians, and intellectuals have left a legacy of work that speaks across time and space to a modern reader.

Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#82

Post by johncolanduoni »

jknightco wrote: post #48
gthtjtkt wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I see it, most subjects in school focus on teaching you what to think. Philosophy focuses more on how to think. That's obviously not true in all cases (there are plenty of dogmatic philosophies) but in my opinion it's much more common for people to teach things like math, biology, history, etc. as a series of objective, memorized facts and formulas. Doing that with philosophy is far more difficult because so…

Based on your comment I'm going to assume you've never taken a mathematics course above Calculus. Anything beyond that is the absolute antithesis of "memorized facts and formulas".

It also fails to apply to any sciences I'm aware of at the research level. Philosophy pretty much only exists at the research level, but it's also a much smaller pool of jobs than most fields.

Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#83

Post by grogenaut »

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #11
grogenaut wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if they have an computer with no games and no internet. As to your response... Should inmates be deprived of all distractions, especially trivial ones? How often do you BuzzFeed or candy crush or Facebook?

> How often do you BuzzFeed or candy crush or Facebook? I'm definitely an outlier here, sample size one. :-)

So all day cc or never

Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#84

Post by mlmlmasd »

110011 wrote: post #71
blurbleblurble wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I profoundly disagree. I believe that mathematics can be learned and appreciated by many, because mathematics is a language for articulating inner urges and perceptions that are common to a wide range of creatures, not only humans. This idea that mathematics is only for the few is self fulfilling, and perpetuated by narrow ideas of what it constitutes.

There is a huge difference between the pursuit of new mathematics and the appreciation and understanding of existing work. I think OP is talking about the former and it certainly isn't for everyone, at least not the way it is currently implemented. To understand this you need to look at the career track of newly minted math PhDs and what one needs to do to secure tenure. I do agree that math can and should be widely…

> To understand this you need to look at the career track of newly minted math PhDs and what one needs to do to secure tenure.

You can pursue new mathematics without having a PhD. I think the most difficult/frustrating part about academic/institutional mathematics is the politics and bureaucratic bullshit.

Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#85

Post by ndh2 »

110011 wrote: post #63

As a counterpoint to the overly exuberant article let me chime in as a graduating theoretical computer scientist. Math is hard and despite its beauty and allure academic life doesn't take place in a vacuum- ergo there's a lot of politics and pettiness from your peers. You should expect to invest years of your life into making progress on some hard problem with little encouragement in the meantime, this takes a tremen…

That's not a counterpoint, that is exactly the point. Maybe it becomes clearer if you read the speech. Math is hard, but it's being made much, much harder than it has to be.

Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#86

Post by mcshicks »

primodemus wrote: post #3

Francis is a great lecturer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqEyWLGvvdw&list=PL04BA7A9EB...

I agree, I watched his lectures when trying to teach myself real analysis. He also has a website with lots of useful info including links to the videos organized by lecture number/subject and some other interesting links

http://analysisyawp.blogspot.com/

Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#87

Post by westoncb »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #65
Koshkin wrote: post #45

Well, mathematics is hard. It takes a lot of effort to really learn it, a lot of dedication and (self-)motivation. Not everyone can do it, and, frankly, very few people - even among those who have spent many years studying mathematics - could say that it is the best way to live your life.

I profoundly disagree. I believe that mathematics can be learned and appreciated by many, because mathematics is a language for articulating inner urges and perceptions that are common to a wide range of creatures, not only humans. This idea that mathematics is only for the few is self fulfilling, and perpetuated by narrow ideas of what it constitutes.

I agree. I've noticed this issue where your anticipated difficulty of something ends up determining your experience of its difficulty. With math—most of the time—there's nothing intrinsic in what you're learning that would make it more difficult than say, learning the rules to a complex board game, or the structure of one's government—and yet, people go into learning math with knowledge of its reputation as only being suited to certain special kinds of minds. If you suspect you're one of the chosen you can go into it with relish; if not, you respectfully put in your time, knowing you're in someone else's territory, and sort of meekly do what you can.

I think most of the difficulty is 1) determined by your expectation of it 2) initial foreignness and the invisibility of the gap between the concepts you need to understand something, and the ones you already have (i.e. when an outsider just looks at some mathematical statement they have no comprehension of, it's not clear that there are a few layers of concepts underlying it which could be smoothly traversed, as long as one puts the time into it and is given some direction.)

Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#88

Post by ianai »

ndh2 wrote: post #85
110011 wrote: post #63

As a counterpoint to the overly exuberant article let me chime in as a graduating theoretical computer scientist. Math is hard and despite its beauty and allure academic life doesn't take place in a vacuum- ergo there's a lot of politics and pettiness from your peers. You should expect to invest years of your life into making progress on some hard problem with little encouragement in the meantime, this takes a tremen…

That's not a counterpoint, that is exactly the point. Maybe it becomes clearer if you read the speech. Math is hard, but it's being made much, much harder than it has to be.

I miss being able to study mathematics every day. It blows my mind how something so critical to modern society can be so undervalued.

Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#89

Post by searine »

cryoshon wrote: post #74
110011 wrote: post #63

As a counterpoint to the overly exuberant article let me chime in as a graduating theoretical computer scientist. Math is hard and despite its beauty and allure academic life doesn't take place in a vacuum- ergo there's a lot of politics and pettiness from your peers. You should expect to invest years of your life into making progress on some hard problem with little encouragement in the meantime, this takes a tremen…

>So the career path of a junior scientist is pretty crushing mentally this is true throughout the sciences. it's a big issue.

Do you think it's the culture of science or the inherent uncertainty?

From my own experience I think it's the latter. Jumping off the edge of human knowledge and hoping there was a result to catch my fall was very mentally taxing. Not many other careers force you to grabble with the uncertainty of creating knowledge, and I think it takes a toll.

Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics

#90

Post by [deleted] »

cryoshon wrote: post #74
110011 wrote: post #63

As a counterpoint to the overly exuberant article let me chime in as a graduating theoretical computer scientist. Math is hard and despite its beauty and allure academic life doesn't take place in a vacuum- ergo there's a lot of politics and pettiness from your peers. You should expect to invest years of your life into making progress on some hard problem with little encouragement in the meantime, this takes a tremen…

>So the career path of a junior scientist is pretty crushing mentally this is true throughout the sciences. it's a big issue.

[deleted]
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