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Maybe I skimmed the article, but my takeaway from this article was that using our abilities to think and solve mathematical problems helps us to live a life of

Maybe I skimmed the article, but my takeaway from this article was that using our abilities to think and solve mathematical problems helps us to live a life of more intellectual resilience. In my view, this wasn't about doing mathematics as an academic career, climbing up the ivory tower, publish or perish, and all that. Edit: I tend to agree. My intellectual capacity was far improved only after doing first year Engineering Maths & Physics. I did terrible gradewise, but it has helped me visualize, juxtapose mental structures, quickly iterate on different concepts etc. I should go back to doing something again. Had to do some cartesian products in a data migration the other day, in my dayjob, it was refreshing :). And as always, this timeless quote from Einstein motivates "Do not worry too much about your difficulties in mathematics, I can assure you that mine are still greater."

vanderZwan 10y ago
> My intellectual capacity was far improved only after doing first year Engineering Maths & Physics. I did terrible gradewise, but it has helped me visualize, juxtapose mental structures, quickly iterate on different concepts etc. Same here, and thanks to the internet just remembering concepts is usually enough these days. Yesterday I had to quickly guestimate for a project how much space overhead we'd have on the server if we pre-generated an image pyramid of tiles for leaflet.js[0], instead of generating a "PNG" in RAM on the fly each time and serving that. Then I realised the number of pixels shrinks by a quarter every time we zoom out, so the worst case would be the infinite sum of 1/4^n. While I vaguely remember from my first year of physics how to calculate that, it's been over a decade. But we have Wolfram Alpha these days[0], which told me it converges on 4/3. So I knew the upper boundary would be around 4/3 of our original data, plus negligible PNG header overhead, and assuming compression is about the same. [0] http://leafletjs.com/ http://leafletjs.com/ [1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sum+of+1%2F(4%5Ek) https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sum+of+1%2F(4%5Ek)
0x445442 10y ago
Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering with minors in Math and Physics here... While I can probably count on one hand the times I've used what I learned in the "real" world, I can say I really value my education. I believe the real value of a math based curriculum or even something like philosophy with an emphasis in logic is that it teaches one how to think in a reasoned, dispassionate and rational way.

vanderZwan 10y ago

> My intellectual capacity was far improved only after doing first year Engineering Maths & Physics. I did terrible gradewise, but it has helped me visualize, juxtapose mental structures, quickly iterate on different concepts etc. Same here, and thanks to the internet just remembering concepts is usually enough these days. Yesterday I had to quickly guestimate for a project how much space overhead we'd have on the server if we pre-generated an image pyramid of tiles for leaflet.js[0], instead of generating a "PNG" in RAM on the fly each time and serving that. Then I realised the number of pixels shrinks by a quarter every time we zoom out, so the worst case would be the infinite sum of 1/4^n. While I vaguely remember from my first year of physics how to calculate that, it's been over a decade. But we have Wolfram Alpha these days[0], which told me it converges on 4/3. So I knew the upper boundary would be around 4/3 of our original data, plus negligible PNG header overhead, and assuming compression is about the same. [0] http://leafletjs.com/ http://leafletjs.com/ [1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sum+of+1%2F(4%5Ek) https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sum+of+1%2F(4%5Ek)

0x445442 10y ago

Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering with minors in Math and Physics here... While I can probably count on one hand the times I've used what I learned in the "real" world, I can say I really value my education. I believe the real value of a math based curriculum or even something like philosophy with an emphasis in logic is that it teaches one how to think in a reasoned, dispassionate and rational way.