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Unfortunately, the mathematics curriculum doesn't seem to have caught up. (Please correct me if I'm wrong here -- and I'd be happy to be wrong.) If you wanted t
by mindcrime 6y ago
Unfortunately, the mathematics curriculum doesn't seem to have caught up. (Please correct me if I'm wrong here -- and I'd be happy to be wrong.) If you wanted to learn these skills as a grad student even 10 years ago, you would have to go to the CS department, most likely, unless you were at one of the handful of departments doing formalized mathematics. I believe that's still the case.
I would guess that by "these skills" you mean something beyond just programming in the general sense, or even numerical computation, as there shouldn't be any harm in leaning on the C.S department for that. No?
Are you instead proposing that a new course be added to the mathematics curriculum, that might be titled something like "Computational Mathematics" or "Experimental Mathematics" or something along those lines? If so, what kinds of things would go in such a class in your eyes?
Since then, there's been a real convergence of tools and computing power that's going to send mathematics in new and interesting directions over the next decades.
Indeed. One of the things I'm interested in is learning more about Interactive Theorem Provers. I just bought a book on Coq and intend to start diving down that rabbit-hole. Interestingly, I'm only just now starting to learn to do proofs based math at all, so I'm especially (but not exclusively) curious about whether or not there's an pedagogical value in starting to learn to use these proof assistant type tools right alongside learning to do proofs. It may well turn out that the answer is "no", but it should be fun to explore all of this in either case.
- lkozma 6y agoThere could be more courses that teach the necessary programming techniques but also case studies of problems that have been solved this way. For example, the course "Experimental Mathematics" given by Doron Zeilberger.
- mindcrime 6y agoFor example, the course "Experimental Mathematics" given by Doron Zeilberger. Interesting stuff. Link, for anybody else who's curious: https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/teaching.html https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/teaching.html
- ABeeSea 6y agoI love his blogging and writing even if I don’t agree with most of his opinions.
- pmiller2 6y agoThis is more or less what I was thinking of: "these skills," as in "these skills, which are necessary to construct a proof like this."