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Funny that most humanities degree holders that I am aware of do not agree that humanties events can be expressed in numbers. They can't comprehend anything rath

Funny that most humanities degree holders that I am aware of do not agree that humanties events can be expressed in numbers. They can't comprehend anything rather than over simplified stories. What I mean by degree holders, I mean Phd degree holders, professors. What being said in the article reflects misunderstandings of math from the arts and humanities community. What they need is a general understanding of discrete math rather than specifically statistic. Calculus is valuable to STEM because of the smooth and continuous natural of macroscopic world. Contrast that cultural/social/econ events are discrete. If you want to draw a beautiful smooth line which fit so badly, that do not tell the whole story. However we see people drawing line cut through a circle in a graph in most humanities papers and they claim there is a positive relationship whatsoever. And here is how flawed the survey is. >>> Survey target: Majors that require calculus were excluded. >>> Many high school math topics were unimportant to college professors. For example, most professors said they wanted students to understand functions, particularly linear and exponential Linear functions are already taught in pre-calculus. You want calculus but you don't want calculus. >>> the ability for patterns and relationships and make generalizations This is unrelated to math. More related to IQ. Seems that students in the non STEM realm generally lack the ability to find patterns as professors witnessed. People should take more concerns on this phenomenon.

ajsnigrutin 3y ago
> This is unrelated to math. More related to IQ. Seems that students in the non STEM realm generally lack the ability to find patterns as professors witnessed. People should take more concerns on this phenomenon. Yep, this holds true for programming too. You either have the mental capability to turn a problem into a set of instructions that can be coded (and then grind through the syntax and language specifics) or you don't. I'm not that young anymore, so my first formal programming course was in college (at the time when pretty much every stem student had a computer at home, some even a laptop for college), but it was just like this... with zero correlation to math grades, some would understand the concept and break the "idea" down to basics programmable steps, and some would get stuck at the "design" phase. Also, this was basic programming... eg. fibonacci sequence, so they could explain recursion after that. Basically, some would understand "ok, I have to start at zero and go on, but i don't need to remember just the last two numbers, so two variables, previous and previousprevious, and a loop,..." (and then debug the for loop since it starts at zero, and <= was used for n or whatever), and some would get stuck in a mental loop, if they have a "n", how do they get the previous two numbers, if they need previous numbers for those too. So this is way before the level of patterns and generalizations, where you need the subject matter knowledge to even know, if you should fit the curve to a straight line or some higher function.

ajsnigrutin 3y ago

> This is unrelated to math. More related to IQ. Seems that students in the non STEM realm generally lack the ability to find patterns as professors witnessed. People should take more concerns on this phenomenon. Yep, this holds true for programming too. You either have the mental capability to turn a problem into a set of instructions that can be coded (and then grind through the syntax and language specifics) or you don't. I'm not that young anymore, so my first formal programming course was in college (at the time when pretty much every stem student had a computer at home, some even a laptop for college), but it was just like this... with zero correlation to math grades, some would understand the concept and break the "idea" down to basics programmable steps, and some would get stuck at the "design" phase. Also, this was basic programming... eg. fibonacci sequence, so they could explain recursion after that. Basically, some would understand "ok, I have to start at zero and go on, but i don't need to remember just the last two numbers, so two variables, previous and previousprevious, and a loop,..." (and then debug the for loop since it starts at zero, and <= was used for n or whatever), and some would get stuck in a mental loop, if they have a "n", how do they get the previous two numbers, if they need previous numbers for those too. So this is way before the level of patterns and generalizations, where you need the subject matter knowledge to even know, if you should fit the curve to a straight line or some higher function.