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The article is interesting, but I feel somewhat conflicted re "explaining motivations behind scientific discoveries". The author of the article is trying hard t

The article is interesting, but I feel somewhat conflicted re "explaining motivations behind scientific discoveries". The author of the article is trying hard to find simple and elegant examples of applications (eg the optimal orange stacking in a grocery store), but imho makes a disservice, as mathematics ends up looking like a walk in the park taken by complete lunatics that were carried away thinking about stacked oranges. When I was a kid, there were some science fair-esq events / electives for high school kids including sections on mathematics. By stripping off all the mind-twisting weirdness and complexity of the real math to make problems "more approachable" to students, they also stripped them of all the mystery and a sense of discovery that I self-discovered and fell in love with much later during my undergrad. Tdlr if we want to get people excited about math, we should not strive to erase all the complexity and ambiguity, making it fully digestible, because otherwise all that's left are a bunch of lunatics arguing over stacking oranges (prove me wrong).

fluoridation 2y ago
Do we want to get people excited about math? I think that as long as they're competent in it, it's fine if most people are mostly indifferent towards it and just see it as a useful tool.
snowfarthing 2y ago
I decided in 11th grade to be a mathematician because I read Jurassic Park, went down a rabbit hole about chaos theory, and ran smack-dab into a conversation where someone asked Mandelbrot if the mathematicians knew he was using their work in practical ways, and his answer was "No, and they probably don't care." Something clicked -- I realized mathematics was so beautiful, it was a worthy pursuit in and of itself -- and thus I went on to get a PhD in math, decided not to stay in academia, and be frustrated that most of the web development I was doing wasn't sufficiently mathematical. Having said that, I also cannot help but think that connections to the real world ought to be pursued -- both because some of the hardest and most interesting mathematical problems come from practical concerns, and because practical concerns draw on math to simplify those concerns and make new discoveries. Indeed, it is a crying shame that there are efforts (at least, on the philosophical level) to try to remove math from physics and engineering, as if the math is what makes those subjects hard! Also, we don't know what approach will work with each kid. It would be a great benefit if we tried different approaches, some of which may "click", some of which will fall flat.

fluoridation 2y ago

Do we want to get people excited about math? I think that as long as they're competent in it, it's fine if most people are mostly indifferent towards it and just see it as a useful tool.

snowfarthing 2y ago

I decided in 11th grade to be a mathematician because I read Jurassic Park, went down a rabbit hole about chaos theory, and ran smack-dab into a conversation where someone asked Mandelbrot if the mathematicians knew he was using their work in practical ways, and his answer was "No, and they probably don't care." Something clicked -- I realized mathematics was so beautiful, it was a worthy pursuit in and of itself -- and thus I went on to get a PhD in math, decided not to stay in academia, and be frustrated that most of the web development I was doing wasn't sufficiently mathematical. Having said that, I also cannot help but think that connections to the real world ought to be pursued -- both because some of the hardest and most interesting mathematical problems come from practical concerns, and because practical concerns draw on math to simplify those concerns and make new discoveries. Indeed, it is a crying shame that there are efforts (at least, on the philosophical level) to try to remove math from physics and engineering, as if the math is what makes those subjects hard! Also, we don't know what approach will work with each kid. It would be a great benefit if we tried different approaches, some of which may "click", some of which will fall flat.