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So you want to study mathematics

susanrigetti.com

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Re: So you want to study mathematics

#291
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, all tracks of math involve people using math. Proof writing is a part of use for a lot of it. There are also very many tools within the use of proof writing where a lot of education is around learning a bunch of tools so that you can better "recognize which tool to apply, then apply tool", in a future real-world use where you want or need to prove something. I'm a little snarky, but you have a broken idea of wha…

> I'm a little snarky, but you have a broken idea of what math is. I do not, which is why I explicitly acknowledged that what I want is not "real math". I don't care about math for math's sake, even a little. Not my thing, never will be. Basically I want to learn to apply useful results from hundreds-of-years-old "advanced" math the same way I learned math in grade school: memorization, pattern recognition, heuristic…

I don't think it's possible to divorce "proof" and "application" as cleanly as you'd like.

For instance, let's take a very common "application" of statistic: given a test that has false positive probability p, you can apply the test n times, and the false positive rate of the composite test is p^n. (For e.g. this is used to analyze bloom filters, or the Miller–Rabin primality test, or hash tables). However this is only true if the tests are independent. If you have to apply this result to analyzing (for e.g.) some new data structure you wrote, you'd first have to prove that the tests are independent. And maybe it's just me, but I find that if I use heuristics to check if some events are independent, I really often get it wrong.

Another example: the uniform limit theorem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_limit_theorem) is quite useful, but to properly apply it, you have to understand the difference between uniform convergence and pointwise convergence, and maybe it's just me, but I found the difference very unintuitive when I first encountered them (in a standard proofs-based analysis class). Even now, if you gave me some random series of functions, I can't really imagine using heuristics to check it uniformly converges to its pointwise limit, I'd want to try to write down a proof to be sure. So this useful tool is gated behind understanding some (to me) subtle proofs.

Re: So you want to study mathematics

#292
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really wary of this. House wiring would be more useful than Shakespeare. That's not to knock house wiring, or statistics. I'd love to know more about both. But don't deny yourself an understanding of the meaning of limits. Almost all mathematics before calculus leaves you with a misimpression that neat formulas exist to solve problems. In reality, you've learned to draw straight lines with a ruler, and maybe a fe…

But Shakespeare is incredibly useless. People don't even talk or write like that anymore. Any imagined benefit of Shakespeare is just fanciful wishful thinking.

When I was younger, I thought like you did. Now that I get older, the value of culture and an understanding of where it came from, how it developed, makes my life just so much richer. That does not necessarily mean that I need to have memorised the whole corpus of Shakespeare, but understanding a reference when it comes around is adding more layers of meaning to other works.

This does not only extend to literature. I have had similar experiences with religion (which I thought of as utterly useless and potentially dangerous, as it "deactivates critical thinking and creates sheep-people which will follow whatever their shepherd/priest/guru tells them"), creative arts (both painting as well as music), and the basic sciences (biology, chemistry, physics).

Now, I don't genetically engineer the stuff in my garden, but understanding Mendel was useful. I don't speak in iambic pentameters, but I can appreciate when it is being used as a stylistic choice. I am in no way a church-going, devout Christian, but I have found meaning in some of the deeper wisdom enshrined in the Bible (and the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita, and about half a dozen Sutras.)

Would I have come to that if I didn't have primers in school? Maybe. But the primers certainly helped.

On the other hand, I didn't learn plumbing in school, or laying electrical wires, or "doing my taxes", but these are things I can simply have someone do for me who is a lot better equipped and trained to do so, or - for the small stuff - I can figure them out on the fly.

Re: So you want to study mathematics

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I came here to say this. I think it is important that anyone who wants to study math understand that real math is not at all like what you learn in a physics or engineering department. In these departments you will always hear people say things like >"proofs are not useful, all you have to do is memorize the 'trick' they use. Once you know which trick to use, it is easy" or you will hear them say. >"Math isn't a…

For what it’s worth, the curriculum in this guide is modeled after the math major maps of many universities, including the one I attended (Penn). I would be curious to know what part of an undergraduate math curriculum will lead people very far astray…

Except for the course ordering, it lines up almost identically with the math major at my university. I'm not sure what the other posters are going on about. Most of their preferred topics that they feel you missed are either upper division electives or graduate level.

Re: So you want to study mathematics

#294

I find it hard to believe that the author started to appreciate physics by reading The Feynman Lectures on Physics before any exposure to physics or even algebra, and in less than three years went from barely knowing high school math to enjoying advanced mathematical physics and graduate-level quantum physics. It looks this is one-in-a-million level brilliance as learning the sheer amount of requirement knowledge in…

> I find it hard to believe that the author started to appreciate physics by reading The Feynman Lectures on Physics before any exposure to physics

I'm a physics major. My first exposure to physics was Feynman, and it made me want to become a physicist. I think that's a statement more about Feynman than me though, as I'm not particularly talented. It was a common story among other physics majors too.

Re: So you want to study mathematics

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it that every time any subject about mathematics comes up there is always a complaint about notation? Your link doesn't even exactly talk about notation, but about pedagogy. Can you be more specific about which notation your consider "arcane"?

> Why is it that every time any subject about mathematics comes up there is always a complaint about notation? The assumption that there is a much better notation is one I tend to see only with the HN crowd. Outside of this group, even people who dislike the notation and/or struggle with math do not claim that a better/simpler one obviously exists.

Yep, blaming your tools is what the incompetent do.

Re: So you want to study mathematics

#296

I read a Murakami novel in high school, 1Q84. The protagonist is a math teacher who talked about math in a way that I had never seen before. I'd been told I was "good at math" beforehand(for whatever that means, I'm not a fields medalist or anything), but for ~6 months after reading that book, I was _really good_. Like, suddenly I did not have to do any homework in my sr. year calculus class. I loved sitting in class…

I'm doing a MSc in mathematics. I tried to read that book once and I thought it was terrible. One of the few books I dropped before finishing it and also the reason why I have been reluctant to pick up other Murakami books. With respect to your phenomena of leveling up your mathematical maturity without doing mathematics, that has happened to me a few times and I would say yoga and psychadelics are the primary source of inspiration. Of course you need to do a lot of reading and studying (or if you have courses then you can sit back and have them feed it to you). One thing is making the information known and the other is to understand it, this is where the things that can spark random enlightenments come in.

Re: So you want to study mathematics

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked up the Chartrand Mathematical Proofs book and it's been a while since I had to buy a textbook, but $175 for hardcover and $75 for paperback or ebook? That's nuts. If I were a student today, I'd pirate that and feel absolutely no remorse for doing so.

Thing is that I just can't read PDFs.

If you have the means, try printing them little by little: chapter by chapter plus any back-of-the-book material. This way you can focus on one thing at a time, tactile paper in hand, without expending money on topics you don't yet need. You can annotate it, solve problems in the margins, file it, and reserve it for reference if/when you move on to successive chapters.

Sigh. I miss having a printer.

Re: So you want to study mathematics

#298
post #31

Are there any "math for people who just want to use it" tracks in math pedagogy? I don't care a bit about proving any of it's true, or even reading others proofs of same. "Recognize which tool to apply, then apply tool", all focused on real-world use (so, yes, it wouldn't be "real" mathematics). That's the math education I'd like—try as I might, I just can't make myself care even a little about math for math's sake.…

My strong opinion as someone who majored in math is that, at least within the US, the standard calculus requirement should be replaced with statistics. So much more useful and so much more important as an adult. The analytical type of thinking that proof-writing is certainly useful, but you can make much the same argument of many other curricula, and besides, it's not like most intro calc courses even do any proofs.…

> My strong opinion as someone who majored in math is that, at least within the US, the standard calculus requirement should be replaced with statistics. So much more useful and so much more important as an adult.

> The analytical type of thinking that proof-writing is certainly useful, but you can make much the same argument of many other curricula, and besides, it's not like most intro calc courses even do any proofs. The vast majority of them, I would assert, are simply pre-med weed-out courses.

A statistics course would be a much more brutal weed-out course.

Re: So you want to study mathematics

#299
post #31

Are there any "math for people who just want to use it" tracks in math pedagogy? I don't care a bit about proving any of it's true, or even reading others proofs of same. "Recognize which tool to apply, then apply tool", all focused on real-world use (so, yes, it wouldn't be "real" mathematics). That's the math education I'd like—try as I might, I just can't make myself care even a little about math for math's sake.…

Street Fighting Mathematics. It's still a bit much to absorb, but you can't really ever say the author didn't attempt to describe each lesson in real world terms. You memorize or learn to graphically/logically derive a few things, like how log(1+x)≈x for small x or how you can sorta guess for most quantities or plots. (One book example figures the data capacity of a CD if you know its music storage using informed gue…

The audio CD thing is pretty clever. Even if you don't know important factors like the maximum frequency, you can get a great guess based on what you already know... like knowing Freddie Mercury could sing four octaves, starting from probably somewhere above "transformer hum sound".

You'd have to know each octave doubles in frequency.

Side quest: When you play the bugle, the played frequency increases or decreases by MULTIPLES of the base frequency---NOT powers of 2. Suppose this base frequency is 250 Hz. There is an octave from 250 to 500, but there's a note between the octave from 500 to 1000 at 750 Hz, and a few notes between 1000 and 2000 Hz, which is the part of the musical scale something like Reveille is played. If Reveille jumped from octave to octave, it would just sound like the intro to Justin Hawkin's cover of This Town Ain't Big Enough.

So, if you know transformer hum is 50 or 60 Hz and Queen's frontman starts his singing at 100 Hz, then he can sing up to 1600 Hz, or four octaves. Mentally recalling what his falsetto sounds like, you can imagine a really high-pitched guitar solo an octave above this, and you can still imagine what an octave above that would sound like. (Maybe you're getting close to dog whistle territory in your imagination.)

This, then, is 6400 Hz you are imagining. The top of each sound wave to the top of the next is 6400 Hz. To record this, you'd need the top AND bottom of each sound wave, because the speaker cone moving from maximum to minimum displacement is how the sound is made. If you want to make sure you aren't accidentally recording the middle (zero crossing) of each wave, you can even take three or four or five samples per sound wave instead of two. It's a lot of thought, but you can reasonably decide that 25000 Hz is a good sampling rate for capturing much of the range of human hearing. Going too far beyond that, you're wasting storage space.

A CD holds a bit more than an hour of music, or 3600 seconds. If you've listened to Dire Straits, Eagles, Cyndi Lauper, Metallica, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, ELP, or nearly any other band, you're probably aware the recordings have independent left and right channels.

Finally, each sample is going to be somewhere between "speaker fully retracted" and "speaker fully extended". With 5 bits, this gives 16 "stops" from the middle point to fully extended. But we know that music can get really quiet when it fades out, and a lot of volume knobs can go from zero to thirty and sometimes higher. When you have the volume at one, you can still tell the difference between loud parts and quiet parts, so you'd need an extra 5 bits just to get good dynamic range at loudest and quietest volume settings, or 10 bits. What happens when you double this? If you have 20 bits, you are probably close to wasting bits. You have a million places where the speaker coils can move to. For a speaker that moves a few millimeters, this means 20-bit resolution allows steps of a few nanometers. This is the scale of computer chips and color wavelengths. If you took the color blue and shifted its wavelength by a few nanometers, it would still be practically the same shade of blue! Without knowing about bit depth, you can reasonably assume 16 bits is good because it's a power of two and will give a lot of dynamic range. 8 would be too low. 32 is just wasteful.

With 32 bits, a speaker capable of moving 1 cm end-to-end will have 10 carbon atom diameters of linear resolution. The ears are impressive, but I don't know they can differentiate the air displacement of (speaker cone area) x (ten carbon atoms). Even having 0 to 100 on the volume knob, this leaves 25 bits of range at each volume setting. This is audiophile (and arguably, snake oil) territory.

So then, you can say 3600 seconds is pretty close to 3000 seconds, 2 channels is close to 3, 16 bits is close to 10, 25000 Hz is close to 30000 Hz... 3 x 3 x 3 x 10 x 1000 x 10000 ≈ 3,000,000,000. Since a byte has about 10 bits, divide by ten, and this yields a first approximation---based on logic reasoning of what we know---of 300 MB. It's wrong, but it's not "very" wrong. (It's off by a factor of two, not a factor of ten! Not bad for 4 rounded, intermediate conversion terms...)

(The idea is to round each term to a value starting with 1 or 3, because multiplying 3 and 3 is close to 10. The reason 2 is close to 3: 10^(1/2) = 3.16. This states that a good midpoint of 1 and 10 is 3.16, because if you square each term, you get: 1, 10, 100. Now, 10^(1/4) = 1.78. This means that any value less than 1.78 would be closer to 1 after squaring, and any value higher will be closer to 10.)

You can even take the analysis further and back-calculate things like how fast the CD might spin by guessing the track width and bit area, how long a track skip would be, whether the size limitation of the CD is due to optical or material properties, how far the laser would need to be to converge at one bit while being close enough that any deviation in the surface flatness doesn't send the return beam away from the sensor, etc. (This is all the info you'd probably use to begin the approximation if you weren't aware an audio CD holds an hour of music, like if you were asked in 1975 to "back of envelope" whether a compact, non-contact, vinyl-like, LP-length recording medium was possible.)

Re: So you want to study mathematics

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Shakespeare is incredibly useless. People don't even talk or write like that anymore. Any imagined benefit of Shakespeare is just fanciful wishful thinking.

When I was younger, I thought like you did. Now that I get older, the value of culture and an understanding of where it came from, how it developed, makes my life just so much richer. That does not necessarily mean that I need to have memorised the whole corpus of Shakespeare, but understanding a reference when it comes around is adding more layers of meaning to other works. This does not only extend to literature. I…

There is a ton of stuff that makes life richer. That doesn't mean we should be teaching it at schools. I can think of movies, games, novels, TV shows, blogs, and music that have had orders of magnitude more impact on my life and thinking than Shakespeare. Should we be teaching any of that stuff at school?

I'm willing to believe that some people like Shakespeare, but it's a small minority. You can tell by the number of people who read Shakespeare for pleasure - is that number larger or smaller than the number of people who read JK Rowling? Why should we teach the entertainment that a small number of people prefer in schools? I believe the only reason we actually do is tradition.

You mention that you can simply have someone learned in plumbing or sundry skill do those tasks for you. I can do one better. I can simply have no one read Shakespeare for me and I can not read it at all and nothing is lost. That is, of course, because unlike plumbing or laying wire there is no reason to need Shakespeare.

It's good that you enjoy Shakespeare, but some people enjoy plumbing. Plus, plumbing has a practical purpose, unlike Shakespeare. There is no real reason to teach Shakespeare, other than tradition, and people trying to seem smart or educated. There are many other subjects that make a much stronger case for deserving to be in school curriculum.

I read a quote somewhere that goes something like "A society that separates warriors and scholars will have an army led by fools and thinking done by cowards." Similar logic, with different vocabulary, applies, I think, to a society where scholars can't do manual labor.

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