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Why Mathematics is Boring (2007) [pdf]

math.ucr.edu

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Re: Why Mathematics is Boring (2007) [pdf]

#71
post #70

The 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 readi…

> mathematics is boring to everyone right up until the moment you need it. Then suddenly it becomes very interesting.

That might be true for higher level math, but anything at the graduate or undergraduate level has been already curated to be interesting.

Re: Why Mathematics is Boring (2007) [pdf]

#72
post #8

If 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.

I'm sorry, but this is a horrible advice. It sacrifices communication for the sake of enforcing an arbitrary aesthetic.

Until mid-20th century, mathematics had never been communicated in this austere manner.

When you are a working mathematician, you never start with a definition. You start with a context in which your exploration begins.

It might be a question which someone else asked that interests you (and there is a story as to why). It might be that you don't even have a question, but the objects of your study are not studied enough, so you hope you stumble into one. You can easily tell why this is an interesting thing to look at.

You do some calculations, take a look at a few examples, see if you can make a stab at the chaos in front of your eyes and find a pattern, which we formally call a conjecture.

Then you see if this pattern holds in other cases, and why. This shapes the backbone of the proof.

Once you have a basic idea of a proof, you can formulate a theorem. In the formulation, you list all the conditions to which your proof applies. The pattern might be much more general, but your proof might work e.g. "only in cases when the order of the group is invertible in the base field", or some other.

After all the work is effectively done, you decide that a concept that appears repeatedly in your reasoning deserves to have a name. Something convenient to call it by, so you don't have to repeat yourself. So you make a definition.

You then decided to share your joy with this world, and write a paper.

You listen to the "beautiful advice", and throw out anything that makes your paper interesting.

Context goes out of the window, along with any hope for the reader to have any idea why your paper is worth looking at. At best, you'll advertise this in talks, or explain over beers. Side note: you will have to drink a lot of beers to make it in math.

Then, you follow the advice again, and lay things out in the order exactly opposed to the one you were thinking in: definition - theorem - proof - conjectures - examples - context.

Wait, you already scrapped context, and the examples you started with aren't illustrating the results you ended up proving.

So you tidy up your paper, come up with more specific examples, and remove anything that wasn't on the direct path to your result.

Having climbed to a place where you can see better, you pull the ladder up. Good luck to anyone outside the group of five people who are actively working in this niche!

And finally, you write an abstract to your paper, where you mention the things you defined. The abstract doesn't make any self by itself, one needs to be in-the-know to get half of it, and read your paper to understand it.

In practice, it acts as a "No Trespassing" sign for the outsiders (i.e. anyone not in direct contact with the five people you have beers with at the Annual Niche Field Conference).

Satisfied, you lean back and post it to arXiv.

It's been a beautiful day, you think. This practice is difficult to enforce, but you kept it as an aim, and got pretty close to perfection (as exemplified by a Bourbaki text, or anything by Serge Lang, but I repeat myself).

Somewhere not too far away, a student in the class you're teaching cries.

----------------

I said "you", but as someone who's written a couple of math papers, that's really me too. We are all taught in a horrendously backwards (literally!) manner.

This perversion of the beautiful art isn't a new observation. I can't write better about it than Vladimir Arnold[1] (a titan whose name is, I hope, familiar to you).

It's worth a read to anyone who has ever studied mathematics:

[1] https://www.uni-muenster.de/Physik.TP/~munsteg/arnold.html

Re: Why Mathematics is Boring (2007) [pdf]

#73
post #67

I 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…

You can't post something like this and not post the video.

Re: Why Mathematics is Boring (2007) [pdf]

#74
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At least that idea is better than the other way some people want to "improve" math notation: drop it and write everything in "plain English". Like anyone who does even basic algebra would really benefit from that.

"The position of a particle at some point in time is its original position added to the product of its initial velocity and the time added to half the acceleration times the square of the time. Now, if I tell you the initial position, initial velocity, current position, and acceleration, how much time has passed? Remember, you can't use algebra anymore because we banned it in favor of 'plain English', also good luck communicating your ideas to people who don't understand English."

Re: Why Mathematics is Boring (2007) [pdf]

#75
Meanwhile, on the front page of science.com: "NF-κB activation in cardiac fibroblasts results in the recruitment of inflammatory Ly6Chi monocytes in pressure-overloaded hearts"

Sometimes papers are technical and don't need to pretend that they are telling an exciting story of interest to a general audience. It isn't just a math issue.

Re: Why Mathematics is Boring (2007) [pdf]

#76

If 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.

> If you read any science papers, they start with a clear introduction with the aims, claims, importance and novelty of the work

I have read plenty of science papers and this is extremely far from universally true.

Re: Why Mathematics is Boring (2007) [pdf]

#77
post #69
post #67

I 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 stru…

The problem then seems to be tests that are too abstract. The students are optimising for tests that aren't requiring them to solve real-world problems.

Re: Why Mathematics is Boring (2007) [pdf]

#78
post #69
post #67

I 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 stru…

I think the tricky part is that students during a particular day have to very much crunch or limit the amount of information they take in when jumping between subject to subject.

They don't have the time, attention spans or memory to be able to take in both the contextualization and to understand the formulas. After all it's only the formulas' that really matter in the end when performing the calculations in test/exams when you have to show your working out. I also find that I can understand the contextual quite easily but it's another thing to then apply it through formulas.

This is coming from a non-teacher but past student.

At University I had more time to think about the contextuals during my degree, but not in high school jumping from subject to subject.

Re: Why Mathematics is Boring (2007) [pdf]

#80
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a non-mathematician this seems to be lacking a little something. Would you not want your paper to provide some indication of what you're attempting to communicate and why? Or is that information (as the joke goes) possible, and therefore trivial, to infer?

A great deal of maths is that you get to use theorems for purposes that they were not intended for. Presenting the theorem in a "pure" form thus allows to approach it without pre-conceptions. I love the analogy with cooking recipes in another comment. Math papers are like recipe books, deliberately devoid of their social context. The same recipe may mean different things to different cooks, even contradictory! Having…

While I was teaching c++ I would sometimes look at programs from a colleague and try to rewrite them in a more teachable form using c++14.

The abstraction capabilities in modern c++ made it more fun and allowed me to condense programs in totally unexpected ways. More abstract code was simpler and sometimes easier to understand.

But after a while (usually my version 4 or 5) if I abstracted it too much (Templatized it, made work for Unicode or char types) etc. the complexity would shoot up again. It became incomprehensible even to me even though I had written it. I knew it worked because it gave the same result but it was no longer anchored/rooted in anything real.

There is a zone of usefulness that is between the completely abstract and the concrete. Physics lives in this zone…it uses mathematics but they don’t feel the need to generalize to N dimensions or to assume the constants of nature are variable—unless they have to.

This is why all good descriptions of mathematics start by showing a concrete problem they want to solve. Gauss invented the FFT algorithm to simplify his calculations of the orbit of Ceres. He had the numbers in front of him and tried to reduce his computational workload by exploiting a repeated pattern in the computations. Teaching the FFT as a fait acompli and showing asteroid orbit as a sample application is ass backwards.

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