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Mathematician who made sense of the universe's randomness wins Abel Prize

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: Mathematician who made sense of the universe's randomness wins Abel Prize

#41

Post by throw_pm23 »

aaplok wrote: post #12
lukan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose for that to happen, the world needs better math lessons in school. Most have allmost traumatic experiences, so they now don't want to know anything about math at all. (I also only started to enjoy math, when I could apply it with programming, before it was not traumatic, but mostly boring, but we also did not cover any fun parts like Mandelbrot etc)

I'm always very confused by this. Why are maths lessons more traumatic than, say, history or biology or foreign language lessons? I mean learning lists of irregular verbs is not precisely most people's idea of fun. And yet only about maths do people speak with such dramatic language. There must be something beyond what's happening in schools themselves that makes people react this way. I just can't work out what it i…

Because in maths one thing builds on another, more so than in other fields. If you missed multiplication there is no way you can get integral calculus. People drop out at different stages and can never get back on track in the school curriculum.

Re: Mathematician who made sense of the universe's randomness wins Abel Prize

#42

Post by cout »

sobriquet9 wrote: post #32
aaplok wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about history? Don't people perceive it as even more unnecessary than maths? Shouldn't we expect to see all sorts of theories on how history should be taught in more practical ways if your explanation is correct? I'm only picking on history or languages as examples. I could have picked literature, or almost anything, really. A lot of what is taught at school isn't necessarily a bunch of super applied skills Ther…

History is not abstract. It does not give you generalizations, abstractions and models, just historical facts. Many of those facts are useful in understanding why things around you are the way they are. The attempts to make history more "scientific", usually for religious or political reasons (e.g., explaining past events throgh class struggle), end up looking like propaganda.

If you learned history as a set of facts then you did not learn history. History is about the connections between those facts and the overarching story.

Science is also taught as a set of facts to be memorized, but that is also not science. In both science and history, the most important question is not "what do you know?" but "how do you know?".

Re: Mathematician who made sense of the universe's randomness wins Abel Prize

#43

Post by lukan »

cout wrote: post #42
sobriquet9 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

History is not abstract. It does not give you generalizations, abstractions and models, just historical facts. Many of those facts are useful in understanding why things around you are the way they are. The attempts to make history more "scientific", usually for religious or political reasons (e.g., explaining past events throgh class struggle), end up looking like propaganda.

If you learned history as a set of facts then you did not learn history. History is about the connections between those facts and the overarching story. Science is also taught as a set of facts to be memorized, but that is also not science. In both science and history, the most important question is not "what do you know?" but "how do you know?".

"how do you know?"

And that is exactly the question allmost never being asked in (my) school. "No time for it. Here are the facts. Accept it and learn them, we will determine your future on how well you memorized them"

But to be fair, some of my teachers tried this approach as much as possible, but within the whole framework of the curriculum, not much was possible.

Re: Mathematician who made sense of the universe's randomness wins Abel Prize

#44

Post by spiderfarmer »

haolez wrote: post #37
webwanderings wrote: post #31

This is such a great quote for everyone! No matter the age. No matter what one wants to do. > “I’m not able to learn mathematics easily,” Talagrand tells ... “I have to work. It takes a very long time and I have a terrible memory. I forget things. So I try to work, despite handicaps, and the way I worked was trying to understand really well the simple things. Really, really well, in complete detail. And that turned o…

I had a college friend that's super slow to learn. He would always get behind on classes and would not even get passing grades most of the time. But! When he finally learned something new, he would never forget it. He would remember it in details, both the whys and the hows. I've always admired his skill.

I always wonder if people like him are able to learn faster if the courses are structured differently.

Re: Mathematician who made sense of the universe's randomness wins Abel Prize

#47

Post by analog31 »

cout wrote: post #40
analog31 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is kind of a rant, but I think we heap a whole bunch of expectations on math progress in school, that are unrelated to math and create a burnout atmosphere. There's a culture of fear surrounding math. Most adults, even people who are in supposedly technical occupations, outwardly hate math. Most can proclaim that they set their math aside after it got them through school. Yet it's also chosen as an arbitrary mea…

I loved math in school and was even on the state math team. Sadly much of the math I learned in high school and even college I had to unlearn (the worst example being assuming everything is a normal distribution and reporting mean and standard deviation instead of looking at a histogram).

I'm convinced that the best way to teach stats is to start people with data and graphing. The formal mathematics of statistics is certainly a fascinating discipline (my grandfather was a professor of statistics) but for the rest of us, the formulas are a work-around to the problem of dealing directly with the data and doing repetitive calculations by hand.

The formulas and proofs are certainly valuable, but could come later. And the graphs remain useful (at least for a hack like me) for confirming our understanding of the formulas.

Also, data and graphing would be a way to ease students into programming.

Re: Mathematician who made sense of the universe's randomness wins Abel Prize

#48

Post by PartiallyTyped »

throw_pm23 wrote: post #38
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world could always use more people like that. Something something effective altruism. It doesn't even need to be altruistic. One would expect that out of sheer self-interest, one would look into propelling humanity forward by elevating and liberating as many people as possible, enabling the brightest of our species to solve the hardest problems and elevate humanity. Though accepting that one needs others to solve…

Yeah, Jeffrey Eppstein was also one that funded a lot of science and science journalism. Fuck effective altruism.

I don't associate myself with that particular group of people, nor did I in any way condone such behaviour, nor do I support long-termists and so on.

My comment was mostly calling out the hypocrisy of some EAs, Long-termists, and the likes. It points out the myopic, self-centered, irrational, and too self-important view, the often exhibited messiah complex, and of course the absence of humility.

Re: Mathematician who made sense of the universe's randomness wins Abel Prize

#49

Post by fnordpiglet »

haolez wrote: post #37
webwanderings wrote: post #31

This is such a great quote for everyone! No matter the age. No matter what one wants to do. > “I’m not able to learn mathematics easily,” Talagrand tells ... “I have to work. It takes a very long time and I have a terrible memory. I forget things. So I try to work, despite handicaps, and the way I worked was trying to understand really well the simple things. Really, really well, in complete detail. And that turned o…

I had a college friend that's super slow to learn. He would always get behind on classes and would not even get passing grades most of the time. But! When he finally learned something new, he would never forget it. He would remember it in details, both the whys and the hows. I've always admired his skill.

I’m like this. I barely graduated school and failed out of college in the first year with a GPA whose square root was higher than the actual GPA. I had always been placed in accelerated classes only to be kicked out once I fell behind. I needed time to understand things, but in all modesty once I understand something I seem to understand it better than everyone around me. Until then though my mind is blank and I literally can’t force myself to do anything on the subject. I just stumble and can’t remember anything when asked. Some subjects are faster than others but some took a year or longer to understand. When mathematically inclined friends took algebra they flew through it and graduated high school completing calculus B AP with a 5, but it took me a year of failing it and being tracked before I finally clicked. But once I understood it other math courses were a breeze largely because my algebra understanding was beyond everyone else’s. But I was tracked and getting off the track in math is almost impossible. I likewise had challenges in geometry and trig until I “got it,” all of which meant when I finally hit calculus and got the concepts of differentiation and integration I took off like a rocket and never looked back.

After failing out of college I went out to the valley and was very successful. I went back to college in my late 20’s using a loop hole to transfer into a top CS school. I knew myself better now and studied all the time knowing I wasn’t stupid just learned differently. On things that weren’t yet clicking I would relentlessly keep studying it and practicing and trying until it did. I graduated highest in my class at a top public engineering program - which gives gentleman F’s to 70% of original freshmen unlike private schools.

My daughter is the same way, so I found a private school that is very careful about differentiating learners and letting them move their own pace. I was suicidally depressed about public education growing up as it ground me down for being different. She is thriving at the stages I fell off the rails.

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