11–20 of 120 posts
I thought I had been taking math my whole life until I finally took a math class.
"This course was like climbing Mt. Everest. It's difficult, and sometimes slow going, but at the end, it's breathtaking how much you've learned and accomplished."
"There is such breathtaking depth and heartbreaking beauty in this ancient art form. How ironic that people dismiss mathematics as the antithesis of creativity. They are missing out on an art form older than any book, more profound than any poem, and more abstract than any abstract. And it is school that has done this! What a sad endless cycle of innocent teachers inflicting damage upon innocent students. We could al…
I'd guess at least some fine arts (composing classical or modernist orchestral music, modern abstract painting and sculpting) would also be pretty inaccessible to general population.
The question I struggle with is... How do you really get by without math as a mandatory topic? How can you teach science? How can you teach someone to balance a checkbook? The current system is awful, but do we push the subject to electives as a result?
"There is such breathtaking depth and heartbreaking beauty in this ancient art form. How ironic that people dismiss mathematics as the antithesis of creativity. They are missing out on an art form older than any book, more profound than any poem, and more abstract than any abstract. And it is school that has done this! What a sad endless cycle of innocent teachers inflicting damage upon innocent students. We could al…
I read this a couple weeks ago and decided to try and find a math book that incorporates some history in it. I found Journey through Genius: The Great Theorems of Mathematics with some great reviews. I am working on an iPad app that pairs up people to mentor each other through books like this. It has video chat and a shared whiteboard, so it is ideally suited for discussing math. If anyone is interested in reading th…
Lots of interesting stories, many of applied mathematics. And, to my surprise, available for free from archive.org.
That's almost Douglas Adams levels of dry wit.
This is a fascinating article, as someone who's never really contemplated the playfulness of maths....I mean, for sure the wonder of maths or the power of maths - I've just never really put the pieces together to link that back to my grounding in maths, beyond the practical, functional stuff I incorporate into my daily life, without considering it's mathiness. Very interesting.
On the other hand, I think everybody really did see the beauty in geometry. Yes, the initial manipulation to prove something about symmetric angles is a bit silly, but you aren't being taught symmetric angles here, you are being taught how to do a geometric proof. Which is not easy to learn, so you start with something super simple and obvious. I didn't observe anyone in my classes (well this was back in 1982, so memory is a challenge here) confused about that point. And, as soon as we learned it, the requirement for formalism was dropped. It was the same in algebra. In the first weeks you weren't allowed to go directly from x + 3 = 1 to x = -2. You had to do something like x + 3 - 3 = 1 - 3; x + 0 = 1 - 3; x = 1 - 3; x = -2; with all the rules that you are using written out. Annoying yes, once you grasp it, but once you proved you grasped it that was the end of that, and we never had to do it again.
But, I had good teachers that always tried to explain the 'why' of what we were doing, and did not make us engage in pointless formalisms. But you need to understand terminology like ABC in geometry; when you get to tough problems you'll be using it. So, learn it with the easy problems.
"There is such breathtaking depth and heartbreaking beauty in this ancient art form. How ironic that people dismiss mathematics as the antithesis of creativity. They are missing out on an art form older than any book, more profound than any poem, and more abstract than any abstract. And it is school that has done this! What a sad endless cycle of innocent teachers inflicting damage upon innocent students. We could al…
"Are the ideas of math that inaccessible to the general population when compared to a work of Art?" I'd guess at least some fine arts (composing classical or modernist orchestral music, modern abstract painting and sculpting) would also be pretty inaccessible to general population.
Or at least I think that'd be true.
I read this a couple weeks ago and decided to try and find a math book that incorporates some history in it. I found Journey through Genius: The Great Theorems of Mathematics with some great reviews. I am working on an iPad app that pairs up people to mentor each other through books like this. It has video chat and a shared whiteboard, so it is ideally suited for discussing math. If anyone is interested in reading th…
"This is beyond doubt the most interesting book on the evolution of mathematics which has ever fallen into my hands. If people know how to treasure the truly good, this book will attain a lasting place in the literature of the world. The evolution of mathematical thought from the earliest times to the latest constructions is presented here with admirable consistency and originality and in a wonderfully lively style."
—Albert Einstein
http://www.amazon.com/Number-Language-Science-Tobias-Dantzig...
While SALVIATI is completely correct in his analysis of the situation, he offers no solution, and I identify with SIMPLICIO more.
Perhaps the problem is that in our schools we conflate arithmetic with mathematics. Surely, they are related, but perhaps they need to be delineated and the difference understood.