Reading math can be boring (often it's not), but solving problems never is. (Math is not a spectator sport.)
I also hear people say programming is boring. This is absurd.
Why Mathematics is Boring (2007) [pdf]
61–70 of 129 posts
Re: Why Mathematics is Boring (2007) [pdf]
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's this got to do with "emerging as a field"? Yes Maths is hard, yes generally people don't like to do it, but that doesn't mean it hasn't "emerged as a field".
It's self imposed because mathematicians love to use their own notation. Math is at its core philosophy and logic, they are both hard too, but they don't get the same level of hatred that math gets because unlike mathematicians philosophers and rational thinkers take the time to explain what goes through their mind instead of condensing very complex thoughts in 20 characters strings. Turns out there are some social r…
> [philosophy and logic] don't get the same level of hatred that math gets
Because children aren't forced to study philosophy and logic for many hours each week.
And if you think logicians (even of the non-mathematical variety) aren't constantly inventing new notations...
> "I don't give a damn about people understanding what I am trying to say, they are all dumb and uninteresting because they don't even put the time in to learn my special notation"
Those mathematicians aren't calling you "dumb and uninteresting", you're just not in their target audience.
> And your field will be kinda hated, which is what is happening.
Again, it's hated because children are forced to study it, because their parents think it's essential. Most people don't think mathematics is an evil cabal of men intentionally obfuscating their work with crazy symbols just for the heck of it.
Re: Why Mathematics is Boring (2007) [pdf]
#63If you read any science papers, they start with a clear introduction with the aims, claims, importance and novelty of the work. A lot of math papers (but not all) just start off with a dry statement of what the theorems being proved are, and jump right into the proofs. I always wonder why editors don't understand the importance of these things and don't enforce them.
I for one welcome the "dryness" of mathematical writing. It feels clean, like reading a story without distracting ads. A beautiful advice that I received as a student was to write mathematics as a series of definitions, propositions and proofs. No text is allowed to exist outside of these three. In practice it is difficult to enforce, but it is helpful to keep this as an aim.
Trying to study a very abstract concept without any examples is almost useless. There is, perhaps, some philosophical sense in which we could only be writing down mathematics for god to read, but humans searching the proposition space necessarily move heuristically. Formal generalization is fine (and even great) for working with objects, but pretty terrible for recognizing them. For example, (and also meta-example), most people do not need to spend a lot of time convincing themselves that the pigeonhole principle is true, at least in the finite case, but show most people a problem that it solves, and they will be unable to do so.
Re: Why Mathematics is Boring (2007) [pdf]
#64Ah, in math writing, it's easy enough to say more and be not boring and at times be at least interesting, inviting, even exciting! Let's have some examples!! (1) Dimension. So, suppose we are in the first class in linear algebra: "Maybe you have heard that the real line has 1 dimension, is 1 dimensional , the plane is 2 dimensional, and the space we live in is 3 dimensional. Well, that's all true enough, but in linea…
These are fine intros, but then you have to actually dive into these topics. Sometimes there is no real interesting way to explain these topics. Fx, iirc the construction of the real numbers is rather tedious. But I agree, that more effort could be done to motivate many of these topics (at least that was my experience studying math)
Re: Why Mathematics is Boring (2007) [pdf]
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they’re doing this more in schools. I was helping a first grader with homework recently and I was surprised the math worksheet was essentially simple algebra but with a shape or a little picture to represent the variable instead of a letter: > 3 + circle = 7 > 10 - cloud = 4 It seems like a perfectly reasonable exercise for a first grader. Clouds and puppy faces and circles. But I have to admit if I’d seen “x…
The introductory arithmetic I've seen recently even kind of flips it around and defines subtraction in terms of algebra. "7 - 5 = ?" is presented as "5 plus what equals 7?"
That's how subtraction is actually defined, so that's not a bad idea.
Re: Why Mathematics is Boring (2007) [pdf]
#66To me it's the language. You have to learn a whole new alphabet and signs. This is done for the sake of quick communication between mathematicians, but it's necessary to make a study and see the pros and cons. While it's true that it makes communication faster and straightforward it keeps so many people outside of the field. Maybe the field would benefit to go more towards philosophy and logic, explaining it with wor…
I think it would be better to just get away from ultra terseness. It's crazy to me how terse mathematics is compared to CS. def velocity(time_ms): return ... vs. v(t) = ... Like nearly every operation and variable is one character or symbol long (with the puzzling exception of trig where you get a whopping 3 characters - sin/cos/tan/etc.)
I really don't want to write a complete word hundreds of times when I am solving an equation on paper.
Re: Why Mathematics is Boring (2007) [pdf]
#67I always struggled (and still struggle) with math.
A couple of years ago, randomly browsing YouTube, I came across this home made video asking how they figured out the distance to the moon before modern technology. The host starts out small scale showing he can calculate the distance to things in his back yard using trigonometry and then scales it up to the moon.
My mind was blown, because no one ever told me that. It was simple, anyone could understand it. When I was in school, all I was told was to memorize abstract formulae like calculating the length of sides of triangles based on angles and known length of one side. It was never contextualized to any actual, let alone interesting or fascinating, applications.
Re: Why Mathematics is Boring (2007) [pdf]
#68I always struggled (and still struggle) with math. A couple of years ago, randomly browsing YouTube, I came across this home made video asking how they figured out the distance to the moon before modern technology. The host starts out small scale showing he can calculate the distance to things in his back yard using trigonometry and then scales it up to the moon. My mind was blown, because no one ever told me that. I…
Here is a fun textbook I found on astronomy http://gron.ca/math/dupuis_1910/dupuis.pdf that is written in a more pragmatic style.
Re: Why Mathematics is Boring (2007) [pdf]
#69I always struggled (and still struggle) with math. A couple of years ago, randomly browsing YouTube, I came across this home made video asking how they figured out the distance to the moon before modern technology. The host starts out small scale showing he can calculate the distance to things in his back yard using trigonometry and then scales it up to the moon. My mind was blown, because no one ever told me that. I…
Most math textbooks contextualize it like that, so I guess yours did too. Just that in school kids almost never care about that, they just want to pass the tests and therefore ignore all contextualization and just remember the minimum possible amount required to solve test questions. So likely you already saw those things many times before and forgot since you didn't find it important back then.
That is the main struggle for many math teachers, they try to do all these fun and interesting explanations, and the kids just ignore it and go directly for the formulas and forgets everything else. the problem seems easy to solve until you have experienced trying to apply it yourself to a real class of kids needing the material for real grades. It can be done, but a teacher who could do it could make way more money in entertainment etc, since that is what is required to get kids to pay attention.
Re: Why Mathematics is Boring (2007) [pdf]
#70The author says that mathematicians find math outside their own field to be boring and difficult to understand. As a mathematician, I think he's rather missing the point:
- mathematics is boring to everyone right up until the moment you need it. Then suddenly it becomes very interesting.
The way mathematicians typically read papers is not by randomly picking through recent submissions to the arxiv and dutifully reading everything they come across. Instead, they stumble on a hard problem in their own research which they don't know how to solve, and they search to see if anyone else has worked on it before. The paper you would have discarded as pointlessly abstract or ridiculously overspecialized just yesterday suddenly reads like a riveting novel today. No amount of creative writing tips would have made it any more interesting to you yesterday - unless the writers happened to anticipate the exact reason you would end up becoming interested in it ahead of time.