Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There was a book called “Calculus the EZ way” https://vpl.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S38C1299093 that I discovered in the summer before Uni. It was so much fun to read I learned it again just for the sheer pleasure of it. Even though they used medieval characters in a magical kingdom to explain calculus that was not the innovation there. The real thing was that they explained the problems they encountered with exist…
Why Mathematics is Boring (2007) [pdf]
91–100 of 129 posts
Re: Why Mathematics is Boring (2007) [pdf]
#92I 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]
#93I 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]
#94Meanwhile, 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.
This does a considerably better job of context/interest than the math example did.
Re: Why Mathematics is Boring (2007) [pdf]
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Euclid.
The Elements may have been meant to go through a teacher who'd help you connect to it, who knows? But the text itself is totally definition, theorem, proof, repeat, and that's all that survived to reach us.
Re: Why Mathematics is Boring (2007) [pdf]
#96Re: Why Mathematics is Boring (2007) [pdf]
#97Ah, 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)
"Tedious"? Yup! Can use Dedekind cuts or maybe something called the normal completion, and especially the first is darned tedious!
There is a good math writer G. F. Simmons, of Introduction to Topology and Modern Analysis, who stated that the two pillars of analysis were linearity and continuity -- nice remark. He also stated that really to understand, have to chew on all the arguments, etc. or some such.
Then I decided to study the proofs really carefully, so to "chew", and in hopes of finding techniques I could use elsewhere. When I mentioned that study technique, objective to my department Chair his remark was "There is no time." -- he also had a point.
Commonly there is an intuitive explanation of what is going on and some views that can provide motivation to study the stuff at all.
There are a lot of books and papers. As a student, I saw a lot of the books, got copies of some of them, put them on my TODO reading list, etc. Eventually, after falling far enough behind on the list, I wondered just where all those books were coming from? It dawned on me, profs need to publish so they do. They are also supposed to have grad students and do. Then the grad students take the advanced course by their major prof and end up with a big pile of notes. Then the grad student, as an assistant prof, wants to publish so cleans up the pile of notes and contacts the usual publishers to publish a book. The top university libraries are essentially required to buy the books, so they get published and bought. And, then, often, there the books sit, gathering dust. I won't say that writing those books was a total waste, and I won't say that students should spend more time reading those books. Or, the books are there on the shelves. They are not really difficult to find. The books have work that was done. Maybe the work is useful now; maybe someday it will be useful; whatever, the work is done, the results found, and there in case they do become useful.
In the meanwhile, back to the mainline of math education, research, applications, usually there can be some helpful intuitive explanations and motivating example applications!
Apparently some authors just give up and assume that their books will mostly just gather dust. But once I wrote Paul Halmos, likely my favorite author, and got back a nice letter from him with "It warms the heart of an author actually to be read, and clearly understood, by ordinary humans." -- at the time I had no academic affiliation and was just reading his book on my own. So, Halmos was surprised that an ordinary human would be reading and understanding his book.
Ah, in what I wrote, I left out that also in linear algebra in n dimensional space, the Pythagorean theorem still holds, that is, an n dimensional version holds!
Re: Why Mathematics is Boring (2007) [pdf]
#98Reading 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.
Expression and personal power over reality are where I get the joy.
A painter can create world and share a feeling. An author can manifests a memory. A musician can transmit a human experience without language.
Human imaginings about magic are immemorial.
Math describes reality. Math also can describe an extrapolation further.
Programming can manifest from the descriptive language of math into the real. It can use it as a pigment for a new kind of picture. Programming helps with everything below, and it enables new things slightly above.
By "above" I mean the layers of abstraction. A programmer isn't an painter, but a programmer/painter has an additional axis of art.
Programming is our species apex of material transcendence. I don't believe it's the top of the pile, but I have no conception for what's above. Its capacity for encapsulation seems to grow as the dreams do.
Programming grows to predict, programming grows to create. Everything is just a new library, a new framework, a new environment. How long before its limits are found, so we can find the next epiphanies?
Re: Why Mathematics is Boring (2007) [pdf]
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can start explaining fractional powers with roots, e.g. x^0.5
Right, the problem is that you quickly run into the "miracle occurs" territory. The square root of a number takes us from an area to the length of the side of the square corresponding to that area. The cube root is the same for a cube. What is the 10th root of x? It's a number that, when multiplied by itself ten times equals x. OK. How do you compute this number? The best I can offer at this point is, for simplicity,…
The 10th root of x takes you from a measurement of an 10 dimensional object to the measurement of a 9 dimensional object. That's crazy, right? Without needing to "understand" what an 10 dimensional object is, you know something about it because you understand what roots mean with lower values...
Of course, that doesn't help you actually calculate the 10th root of x. Is there a better way than basically guess, check, and refine? The calculator is just really fast at doing that (and only needs to calculate a relatively small number of significant digits). Sometimes that's just how math is. The only magic there is that computers are very fast at computation compared to people.
Re: Why Mathematics is Boring (2007) [pdf]
#100Meanwhile, 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.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scisignal.abe4932 This does a considerably better job of context/interest than the math example did.
What's the mathematician supposed to do, say "group theory is cool and important"?