4 ms·
Maybe that's because we don't understand it fully?
by chrismsnz 15y ago
Maybe that's because we don't understand it fully?
- qq66 15y agoThere are plenty of things we understand fully (e.g. translation lookaside buffers) that are impossible to explain to a six-year-old.
- aristus 15y agoOff the cuff, I would come up with something involving parking valets and the pegboard for keys. It would illustrate the important bits of the mechanism and its purpose. I don't know if you would dismiss that as meaningless analogy, but explaining TLB (or Traveling Salesman, or functional decomposition, etc) to kids is not impossible.
- xyzzyz 15y agoThere are things in mathematics that I find difficult to explain even to someone who finished freshman calculus and linear algebra courses. How should one explain singular homology to someone without strong background in topology, algebra and pure math itself? Same thing with theory of sheaves, for instance. These things are not terribly difficult themselves (but they're no easy, I admit), but the amount of time required to explain what they're really about is breathtaking.
- aristus 15y agoI don't know anything about those so I can't say. Not everything has a facile real-world analogy, and there may be long chains of dependent concepts to get through first. Here's the thing, though: if you make an honest effort to explain something like that to a lay audience, you may fail. Or you may not. Or you'll give them a workable, but incomplete and strictly wrong idea. Either way you yourself will end up with a deeper understanding. A huge part of "real" mathematics is finding isomorphisms. Teaching is more or less finding isomorphisms between new concepts and concepts that the student already has.