I would rather say "to live your best life, make art"
To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics
151–160 of 243 posts
Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
"EDIT: The way math is currently taught really forces people to dislike math and think they suck at it. (in general)" Starting in primary school with basic arithmetik. (I help a young boy with his homework) They don't really teach them Math, how to solve thing, they tech them to memorize different algorithms, which they can handle after a while, but don't know what they are doing at all ... So the best mathematicians…
I don't think this is true. Of course, most students do just memorize equations and follow orders. But in my experience the most successful students are always the ones who understand the material on a fundamental level and memorize very little (on some level, memorization is all but required by even the best).
I was talking about primary school ...
Later on, things get better, yes, but not much.
Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics
#153The problem with this theory, is that it completely ignores that a lot of people good at math have poor people skills. And you need people to be happy and improve your life opportunities. So yeah, math is beautiful, and if you like it, go for it. But if you look for a skill to acquire or practice, your taste no withstanding, this may not be the best investment. Sport, social skills, languages, time management, self i…
Maybe people good at math are actually great at people skills and you're just repeating a bias spread by a banality driven media.
In my experience, people are all equally bad at math. There are just people who have spent longer with the problem(s)/domain(s) and have developed a skill set around it. They start from the same beginnings, though. If you take them out of their usual 'watering hole' they go straight back to beginner status (and of course the degree of it varies by how far it is from their usual routine).
Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics
#154I wonder if inmates have access to computers, would they become good programmers?
Give anyone (not just inmates) a computer and they are much more likely to become good Candy Crush players, Facebook users, and Buzzfeed readers than good programmers.
Or you could just give them a Commodore 64 or Unix box with some good CS books and no internet access. (Or a Raspberry Pi, to be more realistic.)
Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics
#155The problem with this theory, is that it completely ignores that a lot of people good at math have poor people skills. And you need people to be happy and improve your life opportunities. So yeah, math is beautiful, and if you like it, go for it. But if you look for a skill to acquire or practice, your taste no withstanding, this may not be the best investment. Sport, social skills, languages, time management, self i…
You could likely be linking an association with a trend. Maybe society treats people who have the personality requisite to study mathematics poorly. Thus, over time, both the individual and society 'negatively associate'.
That was my experience, anyway, and I know it has been a historical trend. Some of the best mathematicians were bullied by their cultures, isolated, and thus had plenty of time to work on mathematics.
Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics
#156Interesting. Anyone have a recommendation on a Math app for everyday use?
The level of math amenable to apps isn't really what Su is talking about.
I would suggest learning proofs, and maybe pick up some Art of Problem Solving books. Or perhaps working through the foundational curriculum of any decent math program (e.g., algebra, analysis, topology, number theory, etc.).
Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics
#157Being math with different syntaxes, this is true for programming as well.
That's certainly the contention of the authors of How to Design Programs.
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/part_preface.htm...
Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics
#158While I can not claim to have made any imporant progress on the sorts of toy problems I like to work on (e.g. counting/bounding the number of strings two regular expressions both accept, counting the number of ways to represent integers using polynomials), I find the mere process of working on them, inventing new notation to succinctly express ideas and read relevant (and completely irrelevant) mathematical textbooks and articles a way to keep an "active brain" but relax: probably because nobody expects me to produce anything and my career doesn't depend on it.
Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doing serious research level mathematics (or any other science for that matter) is almost impossible outside academia. Doing serious work is hard and mentally draining. Mere mortals can't motivate themselves to do it unless the incentives align just right (i.e. being in academia). Also it takes all your time so forget about it if you have another job. I know this from personal experience. After I joined industry I th…
In math we have lots of journals devoted to recreational and more elementary problems. There is a lot of low hanging fruit out there. For instance, compute the fibbonacci numbers modulo the square of a prime and compare to modulo a prime. Are there numbers where the first zero appears at the same point? We don't know. I'm not saying the problem is easy. I'm saying one can make some progress without much theory.
I disagree. Look at 'simple' problems like Fermat's last theorem.
It took mathematics much beyond what was known at the time to get anywhere close to a solution.
Re: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics
#160Earlier 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.
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 bein…
> I've noticed this issue where your anticipated difficulty of something ends up determining your experience of its difficulty.
That assessment didn't come from nowhere.
Given that there seem to be aptitude differences for most physical things, I would find it hard to believe that there are no aptitude differences for most mental things, especially for something so unnatural.
Not to mention that all the things you speak of are very real difficulties to many people that they're not going to get any visible pathway through.